Religion And Philosophy In Germany A Fragment

H468-2 v / 69^12133
Heine

Religion and philosophy in
Germany

193 H468-2 59-12183

Heine $1*45
Religion and philosophy in
Germany

" KANSAS CITY, MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY

D001 OSTbllO b

JUN""1966

2.11

MAIN

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY

Heinrich Heine, German lyric poet and literary critic,
was born in Diisseldorf in 1797. Originally of Jewish
descent, in 1825 he renounced this faith to become a Chris-
tian. He lived alternately at Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich.
From 1831 until his death in 1856 he lived for the most part
in Paris, and it was during this period that he contributed
generously to two Parisian journals, Europe Litteraire and
the Revue des Deux Mondes. It was in the latter of these
that the prose fragments contained in this volume were first
published. OEDICHTE, the first collection of his poetry,
was followed by BUCH DER LIEDER, NEUE GEDICHTE, and
ROMANZERO. These contain some of the best-loved German
lyrics. Heine produced a number of characteristic prose
works including REISEBILDER (4 vols.), OESCHICHTE DER

NEUREN SCHONEN LITERATUR IN DEUTSCHLAND (2 Vols.),
DER SALON (4 VOls.), and VERMI8CHTE 8CHRIFTEN (3 vols.).

His complete works were published posthumously at Ham-
burg (1861-1866) in twenty-one volumes, and a great
number of these have been translated into English and
adapted for the present-day reader.

RELIGION

AND PHILOSOPHY

IN GERMANY

A Fragment

BY HEINR1CH HEINE

Translated by
John Snodgrass

Introduction by
Ludwig Marcuse

Beacon Press Beacon Hill Boston

Introduction 1959 by Ludwig Marcuse

First published in America in 1882 by
Houghton Mifflin and Company

First Published as a Beacon Paperback in 1959

Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-6391

TO MY FATHER

3 De&tcate

THIS ATTEMPT

FAITHFULLY TO RENDER INTO ENGLISH

A FRAGMENT

OF

HEINBIOH HEINE'S BRILLIANT PROSE.

J. S.

CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ix

INTRODUCTION Xlii

PREFACE TO FIRST FRENCH EDITION 1

PREFACE TO FIRST GERMAN EDITION 8

PREFACE TO SECOND GERMAN EDITION 9

PART FIRST: GERMANY TILL, LUTHER'S TIME 19

PART SECOND: FROM LUTHER TO KANT 59

PART THIRD: FROM KANT TO HEGEL 105

APPENDIX 165

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

IN the beginning of the year 1833, Heine contributed
to the newly-founded and short-lived Parisian journal,
" Europe Litt^raire," a series of articles on modern German
literature. The object of these articles was to assist French-
men to a more accurate acquaintance with the productions
of the German Eomantic School than it was possible for
them to acquire from Madame de Stael's celebrated book,
" De 1'Allemagne." Political topics being excluded from
the programme of the " Europe Litt^raire," it was only
in a very guarded manner that Heine could, in the pages
of this Journal, direct the shafts of his satire against the
despotic rulers of Germany. But in the series of three
articles published in 1834 in the "Revue des Deux
Mondes," and afterwards collected together under the
title, " A Contribution to the History of Religion and
Philosophy in Germany," Heine felt himself at liberty to
deal in the most unrestrained manner with the political
condition of his native country. When, however, in
January 1835, Hoffmann and Campe of Hamburg pub-
lished the German version of the work, the mutilation it

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

had suffered at the hands of the censor was so great as
to call forth from Heine a protest in the German press.
How keenly he resented the treatment to which his work
had been submitted will be seen from the Preface to the
second German edition (page 10 of the present volume).
In the French version of Heine's works, the book now
translated appears as the first part of the two volumes
entitled "De rAllemagne." These volumes were care-
fully revised by Heine during the latter years of his life,
but the later German editions had not the benefit of such
revision. The French version, as finally revised by the
author, must therefore be regarded as the definitive form
in which he desired the work to appear. The translator
of this volume has therefore been confronted with the
difficulty of a French and a German version, presenting
considerable variations of text. Some of these variations
are so slight as to render it unnecessary to draw special
attention to them ; indeed to indicate every little change
of phrase would prove an annoyance to any but devoted
students of Heine's works. Other alterations consist of
corrections of errors, a few short passages are materially
changed, and several paragraphs appearing in the one
version are omitted in the other. Where the alteration
in the text seems of importance it is indicated in this
volume either by a footnote or in the Appendix, and
passages omitted from either version are restored. The
actual translation, however, has been made rather from
the German than from the French. And for this reason:

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

it is doubtful whether Heine, wonderful though his
mastery of the French language was, wrote the French
text without receiving at least partial assistance from
some eminent French writer. It certainly was his practice,
when preparing French translations of his works which
had previously been published in German, to obtain such
assistance. It is very probable indeed that the present
work also was first written in German, and then rewritten
in French for the pages of the " Kevue des Deux Mondes."
The method of translation here adopted seems therefore
to be fully warranted by the circumstances under which
the original was composed.

The somewhat cumbrous title in the German version,
"Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophic in Deutsch-
land," is altered on the title-page of this translation in
accordance with the remark of Heine, that the book " is
and must remain a fragment." The translator has
scrupulously refrained from taking any liberties with
the language of his author. Only in a single case has
he felt himself compelled to omit a few lines, and in
this case the passage omitted is not Heine's own, but
a quotation.

The interest in Heine's prose works may now be said
to be awakened in this country ; thanks in the first place
to Matthew Arnold's just and graceful tribute in " Essays
in Criticism," and next to the writers of various magazine
articles which have of late appeared in England and in
America. Mention must specially be made of a recent

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

admirable contribution towards an enlightened estimate
of Heine's work, by Mr. Charles Grant in the "Con-
temporary Keview" (September 1880).

It is proper to state that a number of selected pas-
sages from "Keligion and Philosophy in Germany,"
appeared in the translator's previous volume, " Heine's
Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos." It was the reception
accorded to that volume of extracts that induced the
translator to undertake the present work.

J. S.

March 1882.

INTRODUCTION by LUDWIO MAECUSE

I.

Heinrich Heine's essay A Contribution to the History of
Religion and Philosophy in Germany was published in Ger-
man by Hoffmann and Campe at Hamburg in 1835. Pre-
viously issued in French, it had been written for the Revue
des Deux Mondes, a journal published in Paris, where
Heine had been living as an emigre since 1831.

The essay aimed at acquainting the French with the de-
velopment of German ideas from Luther to Hegel, who died
in 1831. This panegyric on Germany, this manifesto
against Germany, represents if one may employ the su-
perlative the most apt, most original, most witty, and
still not outmoded interpretation of the history of German
ideas. It is Heine's masterpiece in prose; nowhere else was
he more Heine-esque.

No other work of his was as much censured, attacked, or
cited with approval during his lifetime, and throughout the
entire century following his death (up to the days of World
War II), in all countries. The first German censor elimin-
ated the rousing final pages, because he considered them to
be anti-German. In 1851 Count Mole discussed these in the
Chambre de Deputes. In 1870, during the Franco- Prussian
War, the French press pointedly referred to them. In 1940,
the London journal The New Statesman and Nation re-
printed them and called upon Heine as a chief witness
against the German foe. And we, Hitler emigres, successors
of the Metternich emigre Heinrich Heine, recruited him for
military service against the Third Reich in our fashion.
Ever again we underscored that famous passage, at the close
of the essay, projecting Heine's vision of the future German
revolution :

xiii

iv Introduction

Come it will, and when ye hear a crashing such as never
before has been heard in the world's history, then know
that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen. At this
commotion the eagles will drop dead from the skies and
the lions in the farthest wastes of Africa will bite their
tails and creep into their royal lairs. There will be
played in Germany a drama compared to which the
French Revolution will seem but an innocent idyl. At
present, it is true, everything is tolerably quiet; and
though here and there some few men create a little stir,
do not imagine these are to be the real actors in the piece.
They are only little curs chasing one another round the
empty arena, barking and snapping at one another, till
the appointed hour when the troop of gladiators appear to
fight for life and death. And the hour will come. As on
the steps of an empty amphitheatre, the nations will group
themselves around Germany to witness the terrible com-
bat.

In the heat of combat, I myself have been overly zealous
in considering these sentences as a forewarning of the
wretched revolution which transpired in 1933, one hundred
years after Heine's description. Thus this often blamed,
often praised quotation is especially suitable to illuminate
Heine's political position. Is it anti-German? Did he
prophesy Germany's worst future by means of his vision
of hell? We read:

Christianity and this is the fairest merit subdued to
a certain extent the brutal warrior ardour of the Germans,
but it could not entirely quench it; and when the cross,
that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break
forth again the ferocity of the old combatants, the frantic
Berserker rage whereof Northern poets have said and
sung so much. The talisman has become rotten, and the
day will come when it will pitifully crumble to dust. The
old stone gods will arise then from the forgotten ruins
and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor
with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter
the Gothic cathedrals. . . .

by Ludwig Marcuse xv

Does it not appear as if Heine had borrowed his colors from
the arson of the Reichstag building, the burning synagogues,
the persecution of Christians, the concentration camps, and
the rape of all countries of Continental Europe?

So it seems. However, when he spoke of the "thunder/*
he surely meant that which had resounded so magnificently
in Luther, Lessing, Kant, and Fichte. He prophesied poorly,
the great poet Heinrich Heine. He did not predict the
German years 1933-1945, but rather something which, un-
fortunately, never came to pass : the realization of Luther's
address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, of
the Lessing essay The Education of the Human Species, of
Kant's tract Perpetual Peace, of Fichte's Addresses to the
German Nation. It does great honor to Heine that his
prophecy fell short. He had hoped that German greatness,
once evident in a few individuals, would overcome the Ger-
man tragedy. One can nowhere better perceive the German
misery than through his vision of the German future.

The reader may feel that the images of the victory of the
Protestant, idealistic, Germanic zeal which he drew recall
the victory of the swastika. Why did Heine describe the
German Revolution for which he longed in scenes
smacking of Breughel? His attitude toward any revolution
including the one for which he yearned was ambi-
valent, as became manifest in his ambiguous relationship to
his friends Marx and Engels, the "Doctors in Revolution."
Moreover, the gruesome metaphors brilliantly bespeak the
premonition: "The German thunder is after all German
too" that is to say, uncouth, clumsy, boche. Despite all
his admiration for Luther, Lessing, Kant, and Fichte, he
has plainly shown this "German thunder" to be part of
them.

Even though he most ardently admired these, his German
heroes, Heine still teased them on account of their occasional
Teutonic lack of grace. Unashamedly he teased his honored

xvi Introduction

gods. Nothing is more amusing than when he tickles them
in their most vulnerable area : Kant, for example, the "Omni-
Pulverizer," who, out of concern for his dear old servant
Lampe, allowed the "Supreme Lord of the World" to re-
enter neatly via a little back door (in Practical Reason),
after He had "been swimming in His blood" (in Critique
of Pure Reason). This delicious passage which the reader
should allow to melt upon his tongue finishes off a few
thousand obscurantist Kant apologies by the merriest of
laughters. Thus he depicted his deified heroes as berserk
philistines, and thereby gave the coming great German
Revolution a garb which in the thirties of our century looked
almost brown to us.

But only the exterior of this German continuation of the
French Revolution burst forth in Teutonic fashion. In this fu-
ture Germany, unappealing, objectionable, petty -bourgeois
and quarrelsome, the German Lieder poet Heinrich Heine
nourished the great hope, namely the realization of the
radical trend of Philosophical Idealism. Heine's proud and
anxious prophecy was not the f ullstop terminating the history
of German barbarism, but rather terminating the history
of German thought, which he painted for the French, quite
soberly and hence convincingly, as an heroic epic.

The German emigration, which began in 1983, did not
produce a single testimony even Thomas Mann's very
critical Doctor Faustus which so very passionately de-
fended the idea of a great future for Germany as did the
hymn A Contribution to the History of Religion 'and Philos-
ophy in Germany.

II.

It contains Heine's most comprehensive political confes-
sion and his most sophisticated credo particularly since
the preface to the edition of 1852 professes to teach the

by Ludwig Marc use zvii

antithesis of the very book which it is meant to introduce.

We are here confronting a literary rarity. After nearly
twenty years the author negates his own book and em-
ploying this negation as a prefatory device has it re-
printed. Only now the anomie of his remarks concerning
religion appears to be completed, both affirming and denying
Judaism, defending and attacking Protestantism, averring
and disclaiming Catholicism. He appears in favor of atheism
as propagated in this book and against it, because the
second preface sounds like an anti-atheistic manifesto. The
reader who by now is not completely confused must have
read the book too hastily.

With this abundance of aphorisms concerning religious
matters, each more magnificent than the next, Heine can be
made to testify for many things, and also against them.
In this way there has flourished a Heine literature, equally
sumptuous and sterile; a legion of Heine theologies, which
make of him a good Jew or a renegade, an eager Protestant
or a blasphemer, an enthusiastic friend of the Catholics or a
heretic, an agnostic or a religious sentimentalist. The most
scholarly think they understand him by answering two
questions: Why did this Jew become converted? Why did
this atheist become pious once more ? All these dissertation-
troubles can easily be dispersed. The matter can be com-
pressed into a few sentences.

Heine was born in French-occupied Diisseldorf, and when
Napoleon transported the ideas of the French Revolution
across the Rhine., the ghettos in Germany gradually disap-
peared. He belonged to that first generation which worried
how the Jews, who for centuries had led a segregated life,
might be assimilated into German society and its great
tradition. At the time, many believed that the quickest way
was conversion to Protestantism. Heine too shared this
thought. But ultimately Luther's protest meant to him the
starting point of all liberations, as they were brilliantly

xviii Introduction

manifested in German poetry and philosophy around 1800.
In Catholicism he battled the foe against whose "knavery
and malice" Friar Martin had written his pamphlets. Simul-
taneously, however, he discovered in the Renaissance Popes
his allies against the Protestant ascetic bias. Here is how
he sees Luther's victory over the Pope:

If asked as a matter of conscience, I should admit that
Pope Leo X. was in reality far more reasonable than
Luther; and that the Reformer had quite misunderstood
the fundamental principles of the Catholic Church. For
Luther did not perceive that the idea of Christianity, the
annihilation of the life of the senses, was too violent a
contradiction of human nature ever to be capable of com-
plete realisation. He did not comprehend that Catholi-
cism was a species of concordat between God and the
devil, between spirit and matter, whereby the autocracy of
the spirit was theoretically admitted, whilst matter was
placed in the position of carrying out in practice all its
annulled rights. Hence a subtle system of concessions
devised by the Church for the benefit of the senses, though
so conceived as to stigmatise every act of sensuality and
to preserve to the spirit its arrogant usurpation. Thou
art permitted to lend an ear to the tender emotions of the
heart and to embrace a pretty girl, but thou must acknowl-
edge that it is an abominable sin, and for this sin thou
must do penance.

Then the Jews, the Protestants, and the Catholics with-
drew to the background. In the foreground, however, their
adversary was active: Heine, adopting the neo-heathen
style. He came to Paris in 1831, at the age of thirty- four.
Saint-Simonism, "the most progressive party in the struggle
for the liberation of humanity," stood then at the apex of
its bloom, which was soon to be followed by death. The
leaders of this school, Enfantin, Chevalier, and Leroux,
were his friends. Heine, who happened to be present at
one of their meetings which was dissolved by the Royal

by Ludwig Marcuse xix

Procurator, defended them after they had been summoned
to appear in court.

Heine was little interested in their insights into the struc-
ture of Capitalist Society, although their slogan "exploita-
tion of man by man" was an extension of his own more
restricted concept of "aristocracy." Above all he was fas-
cinated by their religious ideas the doctrine of salvation
of the harmonious individual, which Enfantin, "the most
significant spirit of the present" (to whom Heine dedicated
his book), grafted onto the social criticism arrived at by
Saint-Simon, his teacher, a peer of France and the "first
Socialist/' It was the religion of harmony of matter and
mind; God is not pure spirit, removed in pitiful seclusion
from earthly beauty. We must not sacrifice our sensual
drives : the more we indulge, the better we serve our creator.
It was in those years that Georg Biichner, the great German
poet and Socialist, wrote: "Whoever indulges himself most,
prays most." Within this religious framework Heine's joi de
vivre could blossom; his pleasure of being and his fight for
an improved social order were embodied in Saint-Simon's
diett progres.

Heine (especially in his book, Ludwig Borne), did not de-
pict Saint-Simon's philosophy in ethereal abstractions, but
rather in terms of efflorescent figures. With gray words he
painted the type of the Nazarene: lean, somber, ascetic.
Next to it, with the most vivid colors, he painted the type of
the ancient Greek: serene as Homer, full of beauty as the
figures of Phidias, healthy as a Greek god. In A Contribu-
tion to the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,
for the first time, he confessed to a divine godlessness, which
was not yet the pale fabrication which later was known as
atheism.

Twenty years later, Heine is upon his death bed, stranded
for years on a tiny desert island, the size of a mattress.
And "the heavenly homesickness" overcame him. Shaking

xx Introduction

his head, the enervated gray shadow of a man recalled the
former presumptuous Apollo, Heinrich Heine, who had once
been so proud of his godliness. Now he was only contem-
plating and chanting within the categories: then and now.
But Heine then was never the carefree gay blade, the
reveller in flesh, whom the poor Lazarus now portrays with
the malicious joy of the (allegedly) converted. And Heine
now does not experience a Damascus, as shown in the way
he movingly draws it upon the wall of his sickroom. The
then and the now this dramatic antithesis is only a styli-
zation of a great sculptor. For God-Father Jehovah surely
cannot have derived too great a pleasure from this repentant
sinner. "Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son metier" it was on
this level that Heine communicated with his creator and
addressed him less as a worshipper than as a humbled
heathen: "What is it to the grand elephant of the King of
Siam, whether a little mouse in the Rue d'Amsterdam at
Paris believes in his truth or not?" Pious Jews and pious
Christians customarily give the name "God" to Heine's
grand elephant.

Alas, it cannot be concealed, he played cat and mouse
with God, during the long years of dying. One cannot come
close to this pious mocker catechizing him in the orthodox
fashion: "Wie hdlt'st Du's mil der Religion?" and take his
contradictory replies at face value. One comes especially
close to him toward the end of Part II, which is a great and
sad personal confession :

A peculiar awe, a mysterious piety, forbids our writing
more to-day. Our heart is full of shuddering compassion :
it is the old Jehovah himself that is preparing for death.
We have known him so well from his cradle in Egypt,
where he was reared among the divine calves and croco-
diles, the sacred onions, ibises, and cats. We have seen
him bid farewell to these companions of his childhood
and to the obelisks and sphinxes of his native Nile, to
become in Palestine a little god-king amidst a poor shep-

by Ludwig Marcuse xxi

herd people, and to inhabit a temple-place of his own. We
have seen him later coming into contact with Assyrian-
Babylonian civilisation, renouncing his all-too-human pas-
sions, no longer giving vent to fierce wrath and vengeance,
at least no longer thundering at every trifle. We have
seen him migrate to Rome, the capital, where he abjures
all national prejudices and proclaims the celestial equality
of all nations, and with such fine phrases establishes an
opposition to the old Jupiter, and intrigues ceaselessly
till he attains supreme authority, and from the Capitol
rules the city and the world, urbem et orbem. We have
seen how, growing still more spiritualised, he becomes a
loving father, a universal friend of man, a benefactor of
the world, a philanthropist; but all this could avail him
nothing !

Hear ye not the bells resounding? Kneel down. They
are bringing the sacraments to a dying god !

A God dying! Is this not the prelude to Nietzsche's
phrase (today most frequently cited) : "God is dead" ? With
a few sentences Heine here sums up the metamorphosis of
the gods and comes face to face, not with Jehovah, not with
the Father of the Son of God, not with Hegel's Weltgeist,
not with a divine universe full of joyful atheists who are
gods themselves, but with a rapturous yearning before an
empty heaven. This was a religious experience which, since
the days of early Romanticism, was possibly felt more
widely than any other that might be catalogued under a
neat theology, well-described in tomes.

Heine was also an enthusiastic Jew who, out of the tradi-
tion of his people, composed the most beautiful Lieder. He
was an anti-ascetic Catholic who in festive phrases gladly
recalled the processions of his Rhenish homeland. He was a
militant Protestant who like Friar Martin hit hard,
although not with the heavy-handed German cudgel. He
was a blissful little god who felt himself to be in the Mo-
hammedan paradise as he strolled through French arcades;

xxii Introduction

who, for his poems, caught with his eyes the Hortenses,
lolanthes, Maries, Angeliques, Catherines and Clarisses
and at times not only with a glance and not only for his
songs.

But he was more than a Jew, more than one who enjoys
incense, more than a protester, and more than a young god.
He was a survivor at the abode of the God whose demise he
has witnessed. This is why his early and late music is
tinged with mournful brilliance.

III.

Reared among a people not specially given to humor and
wit, it was Heine's humor that, above all, barred an under-
standing of his own life and writing. Heinrich von Treit-
schke, the most pompous German historian, ridiculed him
as a "hybrid twixt poetry and prose." The "Idealists" do
not take to the prosaic: they failed to recognize that Heine's
so-called prosaic poetry stemmed from the tension between
enthusiastic moods and miserable reality.

Some readers of a later epoch caught this point. The
German poet Richard Dehmel celebrated the much reviled
Jew, "who spoke our mother tongue more powerfully than
all German Miillers and Schulzes." And Heine's greatest
German descendant, Friedrich Nietzsche, in honoring Heine,
became still more aggressive: "How could German bovines
know what to do with the subtleties of such a man !"

Heine himself traced back his lineage to the divine hu-
morist in heaven, who advises the Republican, about to
stab himself, first to smell the knife and make sure that no
herring had previously been cut with it. Among his earliest
forebears he found his beloved Aristophanes, who reflected
the most gruesome images of human madness in the single
mirror of humor. Later, Shakespeare made the laughing
fool speak the most tragic lines. In Jean Paul's nature,

by Ludwig Marc use xxiii

Heine saw his own image : a work by Jean Paul starts in an
extremely baroque and burlesque fashion; suddenly, how-
ever, without becoming obvious, there emerges a pure, beau-
tiful world of feeling which, in all its quietly blooming
scenting serenity, quickly submerges into the ugly, gashing,
shrieking surfs of an eccentric humor. And at last he found
among his predecessors Lawrence Sterne, the Englishman
much like himself: "When at times his heart is moved by
tragedy and he wants to express his most intense inner feel-
ings, then to his own amazement the most aggressive
words laughingly flutter from his lips."

As humorist, Heine concealed himself behind laughter.
But laughingly he also aimed and cruelly hit the bull's eye.
Aside from Nietzsche, he was the most witty writer of the
German people. This "Aggression-Wit" was the power of
sagacity against the power of the powerful. "In the face
of haughtiness of wealth and power, nothing protects [us]
but death and satire." Heine was equally great as a hu-
morist and satirist. The wielders of power have already lost
much when their authority is shaken. The comic gift, al-
though it cannot vanquish force, penetrates the grandeur and
the ceremonious solemnity which surrounds it. Boerne's and
Heine's aggressive wit has become an important weapon in
the struggle against power. They have bequeathed us a
mighty arsenal, in which Germany: A Winter's Tale is the
most beautifully pointed piece.

A Contribution to the History of Religion and Philosophy
in Germany is the greatest work of the humorist Heine
even though the tragedian and the merrily clownish aggres-
sor are inseparably united both in his life and in his cre-
tions.

Translated by MANFRED WOLFSON

PREFACE

TO THE FIKST FEENCH EDITION.

WHEN the Emperor Otho III. visited the tomb in which
had reposed for many years the mortal remains of Charle-
magne, he entered the vault accompanied by two bishops
and by the Count de Laumel, the narrator of these details.
The body was not lying stretched out like the other dead,
but was seated erect on a bench like a living person.
There was a crown of gold on the head and a sceptre
was held between the hands, which were gloved; but
the nails having grown, had pierced through the leather
of the gloves. The vault had been solidly walled round
with marble and limestone. In order to obtain access, it
was necessary to make a breach in the wall. A very
strong odour was perceptible at the moment of entering
the tomb. Every one quickly bent the knee and testified
his respect for the dead. Otho invested the body of the
emperor with a white robe, cut the nails, and repaired
whatever had become dilapidated. No portion of the
body had suffered decomposition, with the exception of
the nose, the point of which was broken off. Otho re-
placed it with a golden point: he then took from the
mouth of the illustrious dead a tooth, caused the wall of
the vault to be built up again, and departed. The follow-

2 PREFACE TO THE

ing night Charlemagne, it is said, appeared to him in a
dream, and announced that he, Otho, had not long to live,
and that he should leave no heirs.

Such is the story told in the " German Traditions ;" but
it is not the only story of its kind. It was thus that your
King Francis I. caused the tomb of the celebrated Eoland
to be opened, that he might judge for himself whether
this hero had been as great as poets would have us believe.
This took place shortly before the battle of Pavia. A like
visit was paid by King Sebastian of Portugal to the tombs
of his ancestors before embarking for that disastrous
African campaign, in which the sands of Alcanzar-Kebir
became his shroud. He caused each coffin to be opened,
and examined minutely the features of the ancient kings.

Strange and horrible curiosity that often urges men to
gaze into the tombs of the past ! This curiosity is excited
at certain extraordinary periods, at the close of an epoch,
or immediately before a catastrophe. We have in our
time beheld a similar phenomenon : this was when a great
sovereign, the French People, took a fancy, one fine morn-
ing, to open the tomb of the past, and to examine by the
light of day ages long since dead and forgotten. Skilful
gravediggers were not wanting, who set to work with
shovel and mattock to remove the rubbish and to make a
breach in the vaults. A strong odour was perceptible,
a Gothic richness of savour that affected very agreeably
noses satiated with classical perfumes. French authors
knelt down respectfully before the exhumed Middle Ages.
One covered the body with a new cloak, another dressed
its nails, a third repaired the nose ; after these came seve-
ral poets, who extracted teeth, just as had been done by
the Emperor Otho.

FIRST FRENCH EDITION. 3

Did the ghost of the Middle Ages appear in a dream to
these extractors of teeth and restorers of noses ? Did it-
prophesy to them the speedy end of their Eomantic sove-
reignty ? Of this I am ignorant. My chief purpose in
speaking of this event in French literature is merely to
declare that I have no intention of cavilling at it directly
or indirectly when I speak in this book, somewhat harshly,
of a similar occurrence that took place in Germany. The
German authors who sought to reanimate the Middle
Ages had, as will be seen in these pages, another object
in view; and the effect produced by them on the great
body of the people served to compromise the liberty and
the happiness of my country. But in all their efforts,
French authors were concerned only about artistic inte-
rests, and the French public merely desired to gratify its
curiosity. The great majority carne to gaze into the
sepulchre of the past with no more serious intention than
of seeking for an interesting carnival costume. The Gothic
mode was, in France, merely a mode that served but to
heighten the delights of the present time. Its followers
wore their hair flowing in long Middle Age curls ; yet a
passing remark of the hairdresser to the effect that the
mode was unbecoming, was all that was necessary to
cause them to cut off by the same snip of the scissors the
curled locks of the Middle Ages and the ideas that were
attached to them. Alas! it was quite another affair in
Germany. The reason of this was, that there the Middle
Ages were not utterly dead and decomposed as with you.
The German Middle Age period does not lie in its tomb
a mere rotten thing; it is often animated by a wicked
phantom ; it appears amongst us in the full light of day,
and sucks the reddest life-blood from our hearts.

4 PREFACE TO THE

Alas ! see you not how pale and sad is Germany, and
with her all our German youth, but lately so joyously
enthusiastic ? See you not the blood on the lips of the
vampire plenipotentiary, whose residence is at Frankfort,
where he sucks with such horrible and wearisome patience
at the heart of the German people ?

What I have said of the Middle Ages also applies quite
specially to the religion of this epoch. The sense of pro-
bity demands that I should, as accurately as possible,
distinguish the party called Catholic in France from the
rogues that bear the same name in Germany. It is only
of the latter I have spoken in this book, and in terms,
indeed, that appear to me to be far too mild. These are
the enemies of my country, reptiles full of insolent hypo-
crisy and of incurable baseness. They are to be heard
hissing at Berlin as at Munich ; and whilst you are tran-
quilly strolling along the Boulevard Montmartre, you may
suddenly feel their sting in your heel But we shall
bruise the head of the old serpent. Its emissaries are the
militia of falsehood, they are the familiars of the Holy
Alliance, the restorers of all the miseries, of all the horrors,
of all the follies of the past.

What an immense distance separates them from the
men of the Catholic party in this country, men whose
leaders rank amongst the most remarkable writers in
France ! Though they may not be our brethren in arms,
they are fighting on behalf of the same interests as our-
selves, the interests of humanity. By this common bond
of affection we are united : we are separated only on the
question as to what best serves the cause of humanity.
They, for their part, believe that humanity has need only
of spiritual consolation ; whilst we, on the contrary, for

FIRST FRENCH EDITION. 5

our part, hold that corporeal satisfaction is above all
things necessary for humanity. When the French Ca-
tholic party, ignoring its real mission, proclaims itself
the party of the past, the restorer of the faith of the
old time, it becomes our duty to protect it against its
own assertions. The eighteenth century had so com-
pletely destroyed Catholicism in France as to leave it with
hardly a sign of life, so that whoever seeks to re-establish
Catholicism amongst you has the aspect of one preaching
an entirely new religion. By France I mean Paris and
not the provinces ; for what the provinces think is of as
little consequence as what one's legs think. It is the
head that is the seat of our thoughts. I have been told
that the French of the provinces are good Catholics : I can
neither affirm nor deny it. The men of the provinces
with whom I have conversed have impressed me like
milestones, bearing inscribed on their foreheads the dis-
tance, more or less great, from the capital. The women
of the provinces try perhaps to find in Catholicism a con-
solation for their grief at not being able to live in Paris.
In Paris itself Catholicism ceased in fact to exist at the
Revolution, and long previous to that event it had lost
all real importance. It still lay in wait in the recesses of
the Churches, crouching like a spider in its web, ready to
spring precipitately from its retreat whenever it had a
chance of seizing a child in its cradle, or an old man in his
coffin. It was only at these two periods of life, on arriv-
ing in the world and on quitting it, that a Frenchman fell
into the hands of the Christian priest. During all the
intermediate period of his existence he was the servant of
reason, and laughed at holy water and consecrated oil.
Could this then, I ask, be called the reign of Catholicism ?

6 PREFACE TO THE

It is because Catholicism was completely extinct in France
that it had the power, under Louis XVIII. and Charles X.,
of attracting to itself, by the charm of novelty, a few dis-
interested spirits. Catholicism then appeared as some-
thing so unheard of, so new, so unexpected! Previous
to this period the paramount religion in France was the
classical mythology, and this beautiful religion had been
so successfully preached to the French people by its
authors, its poets, and its artists, that at the close of the
preceding century the social and intellectual life of France
wore a completely pagan costume. During the Eevolution
the classical religion flourished in its most vigorous splen-
dour. This was no mere aping of the original after the
manner of the Greek Alexandrians. Paris presented the
aspect of a natural continuation of Athens and of Rome.
Under the empire this antique spirit became insensibly
extinguished; the gods of Greece no longer held sway
except on the stage, and Eoman virtue was in possession
only of the battlefield. A new faith had sprung up, a
faith summed up in the single name, Napoleon! This
faith still rules the masses. It is an error, then, to say
that the French people is irreligious because it no longer
believes in Christ and his saints ; say rather, the irreligion
of the French consists, nowadays, in believing in a man,
instead of believing in the immortal gods. Say further,
the French are irreligious because they have ceased to
believe in Jupiter, in Diana, in Minerva, in Venus. The
assertion as to Venus may be disputed ; at least I know
that, as regards the Graces, France has always remained
orthodox.

I hope these observations will not be misinterpreted.
Their aim is to warn the reader against grievous miscon-

FIRST FRENCH EDITION.

ceptions. In the first three parts of this book I have
spoken with some detail of the conflicts between religion
and philosophy in Germany. It was necessary to explain
this intellectual revolution in my country, about which
Madame de Stael has spread abroad in France so many
erroneous ideas. I frankly admit that I have constantly
had in view the work of this grandmother of doctrinaires,
and it is with the intention of making reparation that I
have given to my book the same title ; " On Germany." *

PARIS, &th April, 1833.

* This preface appears in the
French version of Heine's works,
prefixed to the two volumes bearing
the title " De 1' Allemagne," of which,
what is called in the German version
" Religion and Philosophy in Ger-
many," forms the first part. It does
not appear in any German edition.
Its interest, however, is not lessened
by that circumstance, and it is the

natural introduction to the fragment
now presented to the English reader.
It also throws light on Heine's second
German preface. The dates of the
prefaces are themselves significant :
1833, when Heine was in the full
vigour of early manhood, and 1852,
when he had already lain for several
years on his "mattress-grave." TK.

PEEFACE

TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION.

I MUST draw the special attention of German readers to
the circumstance that these pages were originally con-
tributed to a French journal, the Reuue des deux Mondes,
and that they were composed with a distinctly temporary
object in view. They, in fact, form part of a general
survey of intellectual events in Germany, whereof I had
already presented a portion to the French public, and this
had likewise appeared in German as " A Contribution to
the History of Polite Literature in Germany." The exi-
gencies of the periodical press, its defective organisation,
the absence of scientific appliances, the inadequateness of
French expedients, a newly promulgated law with regard
to works printed abroad a law whose application is
found to be limited to myself these and other obstacles
have hindered me from presenting the various parts of
my survey in chronological order and under a general
title. The present volume therefore, despite its aspect of
internal unity and of external completeness, is but the
fragment of a greater whole.

I greet my native country with the friendliest of
greetings.

Written at Para,
in the month of December, 1834.

PEEFACE

TO THE SECOND GEKMAN EDITION.

WHEN the first edition of this book was published, on
taking up a copy of it I was not a little horrified at
the mutilation it had suffered, a mutilation of which
traces were everywhere visible. Here an adjective was
wanting, there a parenthesis, entire passages were omitted
regardless of the context, so that not only the meaning,
but frequently the intention of the writer, was lost. It
M r as much more the fear of Caesar than the fear of God
that directed the mutilating hand; and whilst all that
was insidious from a political point of view was anxi-
ously cast aside, statements the most suspicious regarding
religion were permitted to stand. Thus the real ten-
dency of the book a patriotic democratic tendency
had vanished, and there stared at me from its pages,
like an unholy thing, quite a strange apparition that
recalled scholastic theological polemics, and that was
deeply offensive to the humanistic toleration of my
disposition. At first I flattered myself with the hope
that in a second impression I should be able to fill up
the gaps in the book ; but no restoration of this kind is
now possible, as the original manuscript disappeared
from the house of my publisher during the great fire in

io PREFACE TO THE

Hamburg.* My memory is too weak to afford me assist-
ance through an effort of recollection ; and besides, on ac-
count of the state of my eyes, any minute revision of the
book is impossible. I therefore content myself with re-
translating from the French version, published before the
German version, several of the longer passages omitted,
and with intercalating them here. One of these passages,
which has been reprinted in innumerable French journals,
which has been debated about, and which was even dis-
cussed in last year's session of the Chamber of Deputies
by one of the greatest of French statesmen, Count Mol6, is
to be found at the end of this new edition. It may serve
to show the true state of the case as to the detraction and
degradation of Germany in the eyes of other nations, for
which, as certain worthy people asserted, I had been to
blame. When, in the sadness of my soul, I gave vent
to my feelings regarding the old official Germany, that
musty land of Philistines though it brought forth no
Goliath, no, not one great man there were those that
knew how to represent me as speaking of the actual
Germany, of the great, mysterious, as it may be called,
anonymous Germany of the German people, the sleeping
sovereign with whose crown and sceptre the apes are at
play. This insinuation of the worthy folk found the
readier acceptance, as it was absolutely impossible for me,
during a long period, to make any declaration of my real
opinion. Particularly was this the case at the time when
the decrees of the Germanic Confederacy against " Young

* The conflagration of 1842. The the complete German edition of

manuscript, was however, subse- Heine's works, published by Hoff-

quently recovered, and Dr. Strodt- mann and Campe, Hamburg. TR.
mann made use of it in preparing

SECOND GERMAN EDITION. n

Germany" appeared decrees directed mainly against
myself which brought me into an exceptional condi-
tion of restraint such as had been hitherto unheard of
in the annals of press bondage. When, by-and-by, I was
at liberty to loosen the muzzle a little, my thoughts still
remained gagged.

The book now before the reader is and must remain a
fragment. To confess frankly, I had rather that I could
leave the book altogether unpublished. And for this
reason, that since its first appearance my views on many
subjects, especially with regard to sacred things, have
undergone important change, and much that was then
asserted is now opposed to my better convictions. But
the arrow ceases to belong to the archer as soon as it
speeds from the string of his bow, and the word ceases to
belong to the speaker as soon as it springs from his lips
and is multiplied by the press. Besides, I should, by
leaving this book unpublished, and by withdrawing it
from the complete series of my works, incur the opposition
of those having urgent claims upon me. I might, it is
true, as is customary with authors in such cases, have
recourse to the expedient of toning down expressions, of
throwing a veil of phrases over my thoughts ; but, from
the depth of my soul I abhor all equivocal language,
hypocritical flowers of speech, cowardly fig-leaves. Yet,
to an honourable man, there remains under all circum-
stances the inalienable right of openly acknowledging his
error a right that I shall here fearlessly exercise. I
therefore candidly confess that everything contained in
this book having reference to the great question of the
existence of God is as false as it is unadvised. As unad-
vised and as false is also the assertion, mimicked from the

12 PREFACE TO THE

schools, that Deism is in theory destroyed, and that it
now only drags out a miserable existence in the material
world. No, it is not true that the Critique of Reason,
which has destroyed the arguments for the existence of
God, familiar to mankind since the time of Anselm of
Canterbury, has likewise made an end of God himself.
Deism lives, lives its most living life ; it is not dead, and
least of all has it been killed by the newest German
philosophy. This fine-spun Berlin dialectic is incapable of
enticing a dog from the fireside, it has not power to kill a
cat, how much less a God. I have in my own body had
experience how slight is the danger of its killing; it is
continually at its work of killing, and yet folk remain
alive. The doorkeeper of the Hegelian school, the grim
Huge, once obstinately maintained that he had slain me
with his porter's staff in the Halle Chronicle, though at
that very time I was strolling along the boulevards of
Paris, healthy and gay, and more unlike dying than ever.
Poor worthy Euge ! He himself, at a later period, could
not restrain the most honest outburst of laughter when I
made him the confession, here, in Paris, that I had never
so much as seen that terribly homicidal journal, the Halle
Chronicle; and my full ruddy cheeks, as well as the
hearty appetite with which I swallowed oysters, con-
vinced him how little like a corpse I looked. In fact, in
those days I was still healthy and sleek, I stood in the
zenith of my fat, and was as arrogant as Nebuchadnezzar
before his fall.

Alas ! a few years later, a physical and mental change
began to take place. How often since those days have
I thought of the history of the Babylonian king, who
esteemed himself as no less than God, but who, having

SECOND GERMAN EDITION. 13

miserably fallen from the summit of his infatuation,
crawled like an animal on the ground eating grass
which would no doubt be salad! This story is to be
found in the grandiose and splendid book of Daniel, a
story which I recommend to the edifying contemplation,
not only of the worthy Euge, but to that of my far more
unregenerate friends, these godless self-gods, Feuerbach,
Daumer, Bruno Bauer, Hengstenberg, and whatever else
be their names. Besides this one, there are indeed many
other beautiful and noteworthy narratives in the Bible
which would be worthy their attention, as, for example,
just at the beginning, there is the story of the forbidden
tree in Paradise and of the serpent, that little private
tutoress who lectured on Hegelian philosophy six thou-
sand years before Hegel's birth. This blue-stocking
without feet demonstrated very ingeniously how the
absolute consists in the identity of being and knowing,
how man becomes God through cognition, or, what is the
same thing, how the God in man thereby attains self-
consciousness. This formula is not so clear as the
original words: When ye eat of the tree of knowledge
ye shall be as God! Mother Eve understood only one
thing in the whole demonstration, that the fruit was
forbidden, and because it was forbidden, the good woman
ate of it. But she had scarcely eaten the enticing apple
when she lost her innocence, her naive ingenuousness,
and discovered that she was much too naked for a person
of her position, the ancestress of so many future emperors
and kings, and she desired a dress. Truly but a dress of
fi<*-leaves, because in her day no Lyonese silk manufac-
turers had yet come into the world, and because there
were in Paradise no milliners and dressmakers. Para-

I4 PREFACE TO THE

dise ! Strange, as soon as woman attains reasoning self-
consciousness, her first thought is of a new dress ! And
this same Biblical narrative, particularly the saying of
the serpent, keeps running in my mind, so that I should
like to place it at the beginning of my book by way of
motto, in the same manner as one often sees at the gates
of princely gardens a board with the warning inscription :
Here are man-traps and spring-guns.

In my latest book, " Komancero," I have explained the
transformation that took place within me regarding sacred
things. Since its publication many inquiries have been
made, with zealous importunity, as to the manner in
which the true light dawned upon me. Pious souls,
thirsting after a miracle, have desired to know whether,
like Saul on the way to Damascus, I had seen a light
from heaven ; or whether, like Balaam, the son of Beor,
I was riding on a restive ass, that suddenly opened its
mouth and began to speak as a man ? No ; ye credulous
believers, I never journeyed to Damascus, nor do I know
anything about it, save that lately the Jews there were
accused of devouring aged monks of St. Francis ; and I
might never have known even the name of the city had
I not read the Song of Solomon, wherein the wise king
compares the nose of his beloved to a tower that looketh
towards Damascus. Nor have I ever seen an ass, at least
any four-footed one, that spake as a man, though I have
often enough met men who, whenever they opened their
mouths, spake as asses. In truth, it was neither a vision,
nor a seraphic revelation, nor a voice from heaven, nor
any strange dream or other mystery that brought me into
the way of salvation ; and I owe my conversion simply to
the reading of a book. A book ? Yes, and it is an old,

SECOND GERMAN EDITION. 15

homely-looking book, modest as nature and natural as it ;
a book that has a work-a-day and unassuming look, like
the sun that warms us, like the bread that nourishes us ;
a book that seems to us as familiar and as full of kindly
blessing as the old grandmother who reads daily in it
with dear, trembling lips, and with spectacles on her nose.
And this book is called quite shortly the Book, the
Bible. Eightly do men also call it the Holy Scripture ;
for he that has lost his God can find Him again in this
Book, and towards him that has never known God it
sends forth the breath of the Divine Word. The Jews,
who appreciate the value of precious things, knew right
well what they did when, at the burning of the second
temple, they left to their fate the gold and silver imple-
ments of sacrifice, the candlesticks and lamps, even the
breastplate of the High Priest adorned with great jewels,
but saved the Bible. This was the real treasure of the
Temple, and, thanks be to God ! it was not left a prey to
the flames or to the fury of Titus Vespasian, the wretch
who, as the Eabbin tells us, met with so dreadful a death.
A Jewish priest, who lived at Jerusalem two hundred
years before the burning of the second temple, during the
splendid era of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and who was called
Joshua ben Siras bep. Eliezer, has written down for us, in
a collection of apophthegms, or Meschalim, the thoughts
of his time about the Bible, and I will here impart to you
his beautiful words. There is in them a sacerdotal
solemnity, and yet they are as refreshing as if they had
but yesterday welled forth from a living human breast;
and the words are as follows :

"All this is the Book of the Covenant made with the
Most High God, namely, the Law that Moses commanded

16 PREFACE TO THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION.

as a precious treasure to the house of Jacob. Wisdom
floweth therefrom as the water of Pison when it is great,
and as the water of Tigris when it overspreadeth its banks
in spring. Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates
when it is great, and as Jordan in the harvest. Correc-
tion breaketh forth from it as the light, and as the water
of the Nile in autumn. There is none that hath ever
made an end of learning it, there is none that will ever
find out all its mystery. For its wisdom is richer than
any sea, and its word deeper than any abyss/ 1

Written at Parn,
in the month of May, 1852.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
IN GERMANY.

PART FIRST.

AFTER labouring for a long time at the work of making
France understood in Germany, at the work of destroying
those national prejudices that despots so well know how
to turn to their account, I am about to undertake a simi-
lar and not less useful labour in interpreting Germany to
Frenchmen.

Providence, in appointing me this task, will also bestow
on me the needful light to perform it I shall accomplish
a work profitable for both countries, and I have entire
faith in my mission.

Formerly there prevailed in France the most complete
ignorance regarding the intellectual condition of Germany,
an ignorance that was most disastrous in times of war.

o

Nowadays, on the other hand, there is springing up a
kind of half-knowledge, an erroneous conception of the
genius of the German nation, a confusion of old Teu-
tonic doctrines, ominous and most dangerous in times of
peace.

Most Frenchmen had persuaded themselves that, in
order to comprehend German thought, an acquaintance
with the masterpieces of German art was sufficient. But
art represents only one side of German thought, and to
understand even this requires a knowledge of the other
two sides of that thought Religion and Philosophy.

Only by studying the history of the religious reform
proclaimed by Luther, is it possible to comprehend how

20 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

philosophy reached its development among us, and only
by means of a systematic exposition of our philosophical
systems can you appreciate that great literary revolution,
which, commencing with a theory, with the principles of
a new method of criticism, produced the Eomanticism
that has become the theme of your admiration. You
have been admiring flowers about whose roots you knew
as little as about the meaning of their symbolical lan-
guage. You have only seen the colours ; you have only
breathed the perfumes.

In order then to unveil German thought I must first
speak of religion. This religion is Christianity. 1

Fear not, pious souls 1 your ears will be offended by no
profane pleasantries. These may still be of some service
in Germany, where perhaps it is necessary to neutralise,
for the moment, the influence of religion. For we Ger-
mans are in the same position that you were in previous to
the Eevolution, when Christianity was inseparably allied
to the old order of things. The latter was indestructible
so long as the former continued to exercise its influence
over the masses. Voltaire's keen laughter must be heard
before Samson could strike with the headsman's axe.
Yet Voltaire's laugh proved nothing ; it produced only a
brutal effect, just as did Samson's base axe. Voltaire
could only wound the body of Christianity. All his
sarcasms derived from ecclesiastical history ; all his witti-
cisms on dogma and worship, on the Bible, that most
sacred book of humanity, on the Virgin Mary, that fairest
flower of poetry; the whole dictionary of philosophical
arrows which he discharged against the clergy and the
priesthood, could only wound the mortal body of Chris-
tianity, but were powerless against its interior essence, its
deeper spirit, its immortal soul.

1 The small figures throughout the work refer to the Notes in the
Appendix.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 21

For Christianity is an idea, and as such it is indestruc-
tible and eternal, as all ideas are. What then is this
idea?

It is because this idea has not yet been clearly com-
prehended, because the external forms it has assumed
have been taken for the reality, that we are still without
a history of Christianity. Although Church history has
been written by two opposing parties that are perpetually
contradicting each other, yet these parties are so far of
one mind, that neither the one nor the other will distinctly
declare wherein, after all, consists this idea that is the
central point of Christianity; this idea that strives to
reveal itself in the symbolism, the dogma, and the worship
of the Christian Church, and that has manifested itself in
the actual life of Christian peoples. Neither Baronius,
the Catholic cardinal, nor Schrockh, the Protestant aulic
counsellor, approaches this idea. Though you were to
run over the whole collection of the Acts of the Councils,
the Code of the Liturgy, and the entire Ecclesiastical
History of Sacarelli, you would gain no insight into what
constitutes the idea of Christianity. What then do we
find in the so-called histories of the Eastern and Western
Churches ? In the former nothing but dogmatic subtilties,
a revival of the old Greek sophistry ; in the latter mere
questions of discipline and disputes concerning eccles-
iastical interests, in which the legal casuistry and state-
craft of the ancient Romans endeavour to reassert them-
selves by the aid of new forms and coercive measures. In
fact, as men had disputed at Constantinople about the logos,
so in Rome they contended about the relation between the
temporal and the spiritual power: as there they had
attacked one another about homousios, so here they fought
about investiture. But the Byzantine questions Whether
the logos is homousios to God the Father ? Whether Mary
is to be called mother of God or mother of man ? Whether

22 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Christ, in the absence of food, suffered hunger, or only
hungered because he desired to hunger? all these ques-
tions were in reality based upon court intrigues ; and their
solution depended on what was secretly passing in the
private apartments of the Palatium Sacrum. Everything
rnio-ht be traced to the prattling of women and of eunuchs.
Under the name of dogma it is a man, and in the man it
is a party that is preferred or persecuted. So likewise in
the West. Home always desired to rule; when her
legions fell she sent dogmas into the provinces. Every
discussion on matters of faith had reference to Roman
usurpations ; it was a question of consolidating the supre-
macy of the Bishop of Borne, who was always very tolerant
regarding mere articles of faith, but fretted and fumed
whenever the rights of the Church were assailed. He
did not indulge in much disputation about the persons in
Christ, but he was very eager about the consequences of
the decretals of Isidore. He centralised his power by
canonical law, by installation of bishops, by abasement of
the authority of princes, by the establishing of monastic
institutions, by celibacy of the priesthood, and so forth.
But was this Christianity ? Does the idea of Christianity
reveal itself to us in reading this kind of history ? And
again I ask, what is this idea ?

We may discover in what manner this idea had already
taken historical form, and manifested itself in the world
during the first centuries of the Christian era, by survey-
ing, with minds free from prejudices, the history of the
Manicheans and the Gnostics. Though the former were
branded as heretics and the latter were decried, though
both sects were equally condemned by the Church, their
influence on dogma still remained ; Christian art was de-
veloped from their symbolism, and their mode of thought
permeated the whole life of Christian peoples. In the
ultimate grounds of their beliefs Manicheans did not greatly

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 23

differ from Gnostics. The doctrine of the two principles,
good and evil, at conflict with one another, is common to
both. The one sect, the Manicheans, borrowed this
doctrine from the ancient Persian religion, in which
Ormuzd, light, is opposed to Ahriman, darkness. The
other sect, Gnostics properly so called, believed rather in
the pre-existence of the principle of good, and explained
the origin of the principle of evil by emanation, by gene-
ration of ceons, which deteriorate in proportion as they
remove from their source. According to Cerinthus, the
Creator of our world was by no means the Most High God,
but only an emanation from Him, one of those ceons, the
veritable Demiourgos, that has insensibly degenerated, and
that now stands, as evil principle, in hostile opposition to
the logos, the good principle, emanating directly from the
Supreme God. This Gnostic cosmogony is of Indian
origin, and embodies the doctrine of the incarnation of
God, of the mortification of the flesh, of the contemplative
life ; it has given birth to asceticism, to monastic abne-
gation, the purest flower of the Christian idea. This idea
manifested itself, very confusedly however, in dogma, and
very vaguely in worship. Still we find everywhere ap-
pearing the doctrine of these two principles ; the perverse
Satan is opposed to the good Christ ; the spiritual world is
represented by Christ, the material world by the devil ;
the soul belongs to the former, the body to the latter.
The whole external world, Nature, is therefore by its origin
wicked, and Satan, the prince of darkness, seeks by its
means, to entice us to destruction ; and we must renounce
all the pleasures of the senses, we must torture the body,
the fief of Satan, in order that the soul may soar more
majestically towards the heavenly light, towards the radiant
kingdom of Christ.

This cosmogony, the veritable idea of Christianity, spread
with incredible rapidity throughout the extent of the

24 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Roman empire. It raged like a disease; its sufferings,
its fever, its extreme tension continued during the whole
of the Middle Ages ; and we moderns often feel even yet
its spasms and its lassitude in all our members. If some
one amongst us has meantime been cured, yet is it im-
possible for him to escape the all-pervading lazaretto
atmosphere, and he feels himself unhappy as the only
healthy being amidst the multitude of languishing mortals.
One day, when humanity will have regained robust health,
when peace will have been once more established between
body and soul, and they again live together in primal
harmony, it will scarce be possible for men to comprehend
the unnatural enmity that Christianity has set between
them. Happier and fairer generations, born of free unions,
and nurtured in a religion of joy, will smile with pity
when thinking of their poor ancestors, whose lives were
passed in melancholy abstinence from all the enjoyments
of this beautiful world, and who mortified the warm, rosy-
hued flesh till they became mere pale, cold ghosts. Yes !
I declare it with full conviction : our descendants will be a
fairer and happier race than we are. For I believe in pro-
gress; I believe that happiness is the goal of humanity, and
I cherish a higher idea of the Divine Being than those pious
folk who suppose that man was created only to suffer.
Even here on earth I would strive, through the blessings
of free political and industrial institutions, to bring about
that reign of felicity which, in the opinion of the pious, is
to be postponed till heaven is reached after the day of
judgment. The one expectation is perhaps as vain as the
other; there may be no resurrection of humanity either
in a political or in a religious sense. Mankind, it may be,
is doomed to eternal misery ; the nations are perhaps under
a perpetual curse, condemned to be trodden under foot by
despots, to be made the instruments of their accomplices
and the laughing-stocks of their menials. Yet, though all

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 25

this be the case, it will be the duty even of those who
regard Christianity as an error still to uphold it ; and men
must journey barefoot through Europe, wearing monks'
cowls, preaching the doctrine of renunciation and the
vanity of all earthly possessions, holding up before the
gaze of a scourged and despised humanity the consol-
ing Cross, and promising, after death, all the glories of
heaven 2 .

The duration of religions has always been dependent on
human need for them. Christianity has been a blessing
for suffering humanity during eighteen centuries ; it has
been providential, divine, holy. All that it has done in the
interest of civilisation, curbing the strong and strength-
ening the weak, binding together the nations through a
common sympathy and a common tongue, and all else
that its apologists have urged in its praise all this is as
nothing compared with that great consolation it has be-
stowed on man. Eternal praise is due to the symbol of
that suffering God, the Saviour with the crown of thorns,
the crucified Christ, whose blood was as a healing balm
that flowed into the wounds of humanity. The poet
especially must acknowledge with reverence the terrible
sublimity of this symbol. The whole system of symbolism
impressed on the art and the life of the Middle Ages must
awaken the admiration of poets in all times. In reality,
what colossal unity there is in Christian art, especially in
its architecture! These Gothic cathedrals, how harmo-
niously they accord with the worship of which they are
the temples, and how the idea of the Church reveals itself
in them ! Everything about them strives upwards, every-
thing transubstantiates itself; the stone buds forth into
branches and foliage, and becomes a tree ; the fruit of the
vine and the ears of corn become blood and flesh; the
man becomes God ; God becomes a pure spirit. For the
poet, the Christian life of the Middle Ages is a precious

26 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

and inexhaustibly fruitful field. Only through Christianity
could the circumstances of life combine to form such
striking contrasts, such motley sorrow, such weird beauty,
that one almost fancies such things can never have had
any real existence, and that it is all a vast fever-dream
the fever-dream of a delirious deity. Even Nature, during
this sublime epoch of the Christian religion, seemed to have
put on a fantastic disguise; for oftentimes though man,
absorbed in abstract subtilties, turned away from her with
abhorrence, she would recall him to her with a voice so
mysteriously sweet, so terrible in its tenderness, so power-
fully enchanting, that unconsciously he would listen and
smile, and become terrified, and even fall sick unto death.
The story of the nightingale of Basle comes here into my
recollection, and as it is probably unknown to you I will
relate it.

One day in May, 1433, at the time of the Council of
Basle, a company of clerics, composed of prelates, doctors,
monks of every colour, were walking in a wood near the
town. They were disputing about points of theological
controversy, distinguishing and arguing, contending about
annates, expectatives, and reservations, inquiring whether
Thomas Aquinas was a greater philosopher than Bonaven-
tura, and so forth. But suddenly, in the midst of their
dogmatic and abstract discussions, they all became silent,
and remained as if rooted to the spot before a blossoming
lime-tree, wherein sat a nightingale carolling and sobbing
forth her tenderest and sweetest melodies. These learned
men began to feel in a strangely blessed mood as the warm
spring notes of the bird penetrated their scholastic and
monastic hearts; their sympathies awoke out of their
dreary winter sleep, and they looked on one another in
raptured amazement. But at last one of them shrewdly
remarked that herein must be some wile of the evil one,
that this nightingale could be none other than an emissary

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 27

of the devil, seeking to divert them by its seducing strains
from their Christian converse, and to entice them into
voluptuousness or other alluring sin, and he thereupon
proceeded to exorcise the evil spirit, probably with the
customary formula of the time : Adjuro te per eum, qui
venlurus est^judicare vivos et mortuos. To this adjuration
it is said that the bird replied, " Yea, I am an evil spirit/'
and flew away laughing. They, however, that had listened
to its song fell sick that same day, and died shortly
thereafter.

This story needs no commentary. It bears the terrible
impress of a time when all that was sweet and lovely was
decried as the agency of the devil. The nightingale
itself was declared a bird of evil fame, and men made the
sign of the cross when it sang. The true Christian walked
abroad with his sentient being wrapped in anxious reserve,
like an abstraction, like a spectre in the midst of smiling na-
ture. I shall perhaps, in a later work, speak more at length
of the relation established between the Christian soul and
nature ; for in order to elucidate the spirit of modern
romantic literature, I shall be obliged to discuss minutely
German popular superstitions.* For the present I can
only remark that French authors, misled by certain Ger-
man authorities, have fallen into gross error in supposing
that during the Middle Ages popular superstitions were
identical throughout the whole of Europe. It was only
with regard to the principle of good, the kingdom of Christ,
that the same views were universally entertained in
Europe. The Church of Eome took care that it should be
so, and whoever deviated on this subject from the pre-
scribed opinion was a heretic. But with regard to the
principle of evil, the empire of Satan, opinions varied in
the various countries. In the Teutonic north, men's con-

* Heine (in part at least) fulfilled this promise in his " Elementary
Spirits." TR.

28 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

ceptions of this principle differed entirely from those held
in the Latin countries of the south. This difference arose
from the fact that the Christian priesthood did not reject
as idle dreams the old national divinities, but conceded to
them a real existence, asserting however, that all these
deities were but male or female devils, who through the
triumph of Christ had lost their power over men, and were
now seeking to allure them back to sin by wiles and sen-
sual delights. All Olympus had become an aerial hell ;
and if a poet of the Middle Ages celebrated the epos of the
Greek divinities, sang he ever so sweetly, the pious Chris-
tian beheld in his song only goblins and demons. The
dismal anathema of the monks fell most rudely on poor
Venus; she especially was held to be a daughter of Beel-
zebub, and the good knight Tanhauser tells her even to
her face

" Venus, thou goddess mine,
Thou'rt but a devil fair and fine ! "

For Venus had enticed this knight Tanhauser into that
wonderful cavern in what is called the Mountain of
Venus, wherein, as the legend tells, the beautiful goddess
and her attendants lead, amidst pastime and dance, the
most dissolute life. Poor Diana, too, despite her chastity,
was not exempt from a like fate, and was accused of scour-
ing the woods by night with her nymphs; hence the
legends of the fierce huntsman and the wild nightly chase.
Here we have indications of the true Gnostic conception
as to the deterioration of the previously divine, and in this
transformation of ancient national beliefs the idea of Chris-
tianity most profoundly manifests itself.

National faith in Europe, though more strongly marked
in the northern than in the southern countries, was pan-
theistic. Its mysteries and symbols were referable to a
worship of nature ; in every element men adored some
marvellous being, every tree revealed a deity, all the phe-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 29

nomena of the universe were informed by divinity. Chris-
tianity reversed this view; nature, ceasing to bear the
impress of the divine, became diabolised. But the joyous
and artistically beautiful forms of Greek mythology that
were still potent side by side with Latin civilisation in the
south, could not so readily be transformed into the hideous
and repulsive features of Satan as the Teutonic gods, over
whose creation certainly no artistic thought had presided,
and who were always as dreary and as sad as their northern
abodes. Thus in France you could produce no such gloomy
and terrible kingdom of Satan as we in Germany, and the
world of apparitions and sorcery even assumed with you
a genial aspect. How beautiful, how distinct and many-
coloured are the popular legends of France compared with
those of Germany ; those monstrosities of blood and cloud
that glare at us with such wan and cruel countenances.
Our poets of the Middle Ages, selecting in general such
materials as had either been first imagined or first treated
in Brittany and Normandy, imparted to their works, per-
haps intentionally, as much as possible of the genial old
French spirit. But our national poetry and our traditional
folk-lore preserved that dismal northern spirit of which
you can hardly form any idea. Like us you have many
kinds of elementary spirits, but ours differ as widely from
yours as a German differs from a Frenchman. How
brightly coloured and especially how cleanly are the
demons of your fabliaux and wizard romances in compari-
son with the rabble-rout of our colourless and very often
filthy ghosts ! Your fays and sprites, whether borrowed
from Cornwall or from Arabia, become quite naturalised
among you, and a French ghost is distinguished from a
German ghost much as a dandy wearing kid gloves and
dawdling along the Boulevard Coblence is distinguished
from a clumsy German porter. Your water sprites, such
as Melusine, have as little resemblance to ours as a princess

30 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

has to a washerwoman. How horrified your fay Morgana
would be did she chance to meet a German witch, naked,
smeared with ointment, riding on a broomstick to the
Brocken ! This mountain is no fair Avallon, but a meet-
ing-place for all that is abominable and hideous. On the
summit of the mountain sits Satan in the form of a black
goat. Each witch approaches him bearing a lighted candle,
and kisses the spot where the back ceases. Thereafter the
whole crazy sisterhood dances round him, singing donder-
emus, donderemus ! the goat bleats, the infernal rabble
shouts. It is an evil omen for a witch to lose a shoe in
this dance ; it betokens that she will be burnt that same
year. But the mad sabbat-music, worthy of Berlioz, over-
powers all foreboding anxiety, and when the poor witch
wakes in the morning from her intoxication, it is to find
herself lying naked and exhausted among the ashes of the
dying fire.

The best information concerning these witches is to be
found in the " Demonology " of the honourable and learned
Doctor Nicolas Remigius, criminal judge to his serene
highness the Duke of Lorraine. This sagacious man had
certainly the best opportunity for becoming acquainted
with the doings of the witches, for he conducted the prose-
cutions against them, and in his time eight hundred women
in Lorraine alone were burnt at the stake, after being
convicted of witchcraft. Proof of their guilt was mainly
established in this wise : their feet and hands being bound
together, they were thrown into the water. If they sank
and were drowned, they were innocent; but if they
remained floating on the surface, they were pronounced
guilty, and were burnt. Such was the logic of the time.

The main feature in the character of German demons
is that everything ideal has been stripped from them,
and thus they exhibit a mixture of the vile and the
horrible. The more coarsely familiar the form in which

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 31

they present themselves the more terrible the effect they
produce. Nothing can be weirder than our hobgoblins,
cobolds, and gnomes. Praetorius, in his Anthropodemw
Plutonicm, has a passage on this subject which I quote
from Dobeneck.*

"The ancients could not conceive hobgoblins (Polter-
geister) as other than veritable men of the stature of
diminutive children wearing parti-coloured little coats or
dresses. Some add that they have a knife sticking from
their backs, they having been done to death with this
instrument ; and as thus represented they have a hideous
aspect. The superstitious believe them to be the souls of
former occupants of their houses, who had been murdered.
They tell, also, many a story as to how these cobolds, after
rendering good service to the maids and cook-wenches in
the house, so won their affections that many of these
servants became enamoured of the cobolds to such a
degree that they experienced an ardent desire to see the
manikins, and eagerly longed for their appearance. But
the spirits would never willingly gratify this longing,
making the excuse that they could not be seen without
inspiring horror. Though, when the maids persisted in
their desire to behold them, the cobolds would indicate
some part of the house where they would present them-
selves corporeally. The persons wishing to see the cobolds
must, however, bring with them a pail of cold water.
Now it sometimes happened that one of these cobolds
would lay himself down naked and as if dead on the
ground with a long knife sticking in his back. On seeing
the creature thus lying, many a servant became so sorely
terrified that she would fall down fainting. Thereupon
the thing would immediately spring up, seize the water-
pail and souse the girl with its contents in order to bring

* Dobeneck's " German Popular Superstitions and Heroic Legends of
the Middle Ages."

32 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

her to her senses. After this the maid would lose all
desire for the creature, and would never again seek to
behold little Chim. For you must know the cobolds all
have particular names, though generally called Chim. It
is said also that for the men and maid servants to whom
they are devoted they will perform all kinds of house-
work : currying and feeding the horses, cleaning the
stable, scouring up everything, tending the cows, doing
whatever is necessary in and about the house, and paying
such attention that the cattle grow fat and sleek under
their care. In return the cobolds require to be much
indulged by the domestics, who dare not cause them the
slightest offence either by laughing at them or by neglect-
ing to provide their food. And a cook-wench having
taken one of these little creatures into her secret service,
must set down for it daily at the same hour and in an
appointed place in the house, a dish of well prepared and
well seasoned food, and then go her way without looking
behind ; after that she may pass her time in idleness, and
go to bed when she pleases ; yet at early morning she will
find all her work carefully performed. But should she on
a single occasion neglect her duty, as by omitting to set
down the food, she will be obliged to do her work without
assistance, and will meet with all kinds of mishaps:
either getting herself burned with hot water, or breaking
the pots and dishes, or spilling the sauce and so forth
misadventures that infallibly bring upon her a scolding
from the master or mistress of the house, at which the
cobold may often be heard tittering and laughing. And
such a cobold is accustomed to remain in a house even
though the servants are changed. Indeed, a maid when
she is leaving a house ought to recommend the cobold to
her successor, so that it may continue its services in the
household. Should the new servant pay no heed to
the recommendation she will not fail to meet with per-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 33

petual misfortunes and will speedily be forced to quit the
house."

The following anecdote is perhaps one of the most
terrible of its kind.

A maid-servant had during many years an invisible
familiar spirit that sat beside her by the hearth, where
she had set apart for it a little place, entertaining herself
with the creature during the long winter evenings. Now
the maid once begged Heinzchen (for so the spirit was
called) to show himself to her in his natural form.
Heinzchen, however, refused to do so. At last, after
much entreaty, he consented, and bade the maid descend
into the cellar and there she would see him. The girl,
taking a candle, goes down into the cellar, arid there in an
open cask she beholds a dead infant swimming in its
blood. Now this servant had many years before given
birth to a child, and had secretly murdered and concealed
it in a cask.

Such is the idiosyncrasy of the Germans that they often
seek in the horrible their merriest jests, and the popular
legends relating to cobolds are frequently characterised by
diverting traits. The most amusing of such stories are
those about Hiideken, a cobold that carried on his pranks
at Hildesheim in the twelfth century, of whom there is
so much talk amongst our gossiping spinsters and in our
romances of the spirit- world. I borrow from the Chronicle
of the Monastery of Hirschau, by the Abbot Tritheim, the
following narrative :

"In the year 1132 there appeared to many persons iii
the bishopric of Hildesheim, being seen of them during a
considerable time, an evil spirit in the form of a peasant
with a hat on his head ; whence the country people called
it, in the Saxon language, Hudeken (little hat). This spirit
took delight in haunting people, being sometimes visible,
sometimes invisible, in asking questions and in replying

34 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

to their queries. He gave offence to no one without cause.
When, however, any one mocked at or otherwise insulted
him, he avenged the injury done him in the completest
manner. The Count Burchard of Luka having been killed
by the Count Hermann of Weissenburg, and the territory
of the latter being in danger of falling into the hands of
the avengers of the murdered count, Hlideken awoke the
Bishop of Hildesheim out of sleep, and spoke to him in
these words : ' Arise, bald-head ! the county of Weissen-
burg is abandoned and become vacant through the mur-
derous deed of its seigneur, and thou may'st easily obtain
possession of it.' The bishop speedily assembled his
men-at-arms, fell upon the land of the guilty count, and
united it, with permission of the emperor, to his bishopric.
The spirit repeatedly and importunately gave warning to
the said bishop of impending dangers, and frequently
appeared in the kitchens of the episcopal palace, where he
conversed with the scullions and rendered them all manner
of service. The domestics having by degrees become very
familiar with Hiideken, a young scullion was daring enough
to tease him and even to souse him with dirty water as
often as he made his appearance. The spirit besought the
chief cook or steward of the kitchens to forbid the imper-
tinent boy's indulgence in such mischief. To this request
the chief cook answered, ' Thou art a spirit and yet art
thou afraid of a mere boy ! ' Whereupon Hiideken replied
in a menacing tone, ' Since thou wilt not punish the boy,
I shall show thee within a few days how far I am afraid of
him.' Soon after this it happened that the boy who had
offended the spirit was in the kitchen quite alone and
asleep. In this condition the spirit seized him, stabbed
him, cut the body in pieces and threw the fragments into
the pots placed over the fire. When the cook discovered
what had been done, he cursed the spirit ; and next day
Hiideken spoiled all the roasts that were on the spits, by

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 35

pouring over them the venom and blood of vipers. The
thirst for revenge suggested to the cook new insults, until
finally the spirit enticed him on to an enchanted false
bridge, thus causing him to fall into the castle moat. After
this Hiideken made the walls and towers of the town his
nightly haunt, causing much anxiety to the sentinels, and
obliging them to keep a diligent watch. A citizen that
had an unfaithful wife said jestingly, one day as he was
about to set out on a journey, * Hiideken, my good friend,
I commend my wife to thy charge ; guard her carefully ! '
As soon as the husband had gone his faithless wife per-
mitted her lovers, one after another, to visit her. But
Hiideken did not let a single one of them approach her,
and threw them all out of bed on to the floor. When the
husband returned from his journey, the spirit went to meet
him, and said to him, ' I am heartily glad of thy return,
whereby I am relieved of the burdensome duty thou didst
lay on me. I have with unspeakable difficulty preserved
thy wife from actual disloyalty, and I beg thee never again
to place her under my care. I had rather have the keep-
ing of all the swine in the whole Saxon land than of a
woman that seeks by deceit to throw herself into the arms
of her lovers/ "

I ought, for the sake of historical accuracy, to remark
that the hat worn by Hiideken differs from the ordinary
costume of cobolds. They are generally clad in grey, and
wear a red cap ; at least this is the garb they assume in
Denmark, where nowadays they are to be met with in
greatest numbers. I used to be of opinion that they had
chosen Denmark as their favourite resort from their fond-
ness for red groats. But a young Danish poet, Herr Ander-
sen, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Paris this
summer, positively assured me that the favourite food of
the nissen (as the cobolds are called in Denmark) is fru-
menty with batter. Once these cobolds have taken up

36 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

their abode in a house they are not disposed readily to
quit it again. Yet they never come without previous
announcement, and when desiring to settle down anywhere
they give notice of their intention to the master of the
house in the following manner: They carry into the
house by night a great quantity of wood-chips and strew
the ordure of cattle in the milk-cans. If the master of
the house does not throw out the wood-chips, if he and
his family consume the milk thus made foul, then the
cobolds instal themselves permanently in his house. A
poor Jutlander became at last so much annoyed at the en-
forced companionship of such a cobold, that he determined
to abandon his whole house to the creature. Loading his
goods and chattels on a cart, he drove off with them
towards the next village, in order to settle there. But on
the way thither, chancing to look round, he espied, peeping
out of one of the empty milk-churns, the little red-capped
head of the cobold, who called out to him complacently,
" Wi flutten J" (we are flitting).

I have perhaps lingered too long over these little demons,
and it is time that I should return to the great ones. Yet
all these legends illustrate the character and the beliefs
of the German people. These beliefs were formerly just
as powerful in influence as was the creed of the Church.
By the time the learned doctor Eemigius had completed
his great work on witchcraft, he believed himself to be so
completely master of his subject as to imagine that he
could himself exercise the power of sorcery; and, con-
scientious man that he was, he did not fail to denounce
himself to the tribunals as a sorcerer, and was burned as
such on the strength of his own testimony.

These atrocities did not originate directly in the Chris-
tian Church, though indirectly such was their origin ; for,
the Church had so cunningly inverted the old Teutonic
religion, that the pantheistic cosmogony of the Germans

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 37

was transformed into a pandemonic conception ; the former
popular divinities were changed into hideous fiends. But
man does not willingly abandon that which has been dear
to his forefathers, and his affections secretly cling firmly
thereto, even when it has been mutilated and defaced.
Hence popular superstitions, travestied as they have be-
come, may in Germany outlive the official creed of our
days, which is not, like them, rooted in the ancient
nationality. At the time of the Keformation, faith in the
Catholic legends disappeared with great rapidity ; but not
so belief in enchantments and sorcery. Luther ceases to
believe in Catholic miracles ; but he still believes in the
power of the devil. His " Table-Talk " is full of curious
anecdotes of Satanic art, of cobolds and witches. He
himself, in his distress, often fancies that he is engaged
in combat with the devil in person. On the Wartburg,
where he translated the New Testament, he was so much
disturbed by the devil that he threw the inkstand at his
head. The devil has ever since that day had a great
dread of ink, and a still greater dread of printing-ink. Of
the craftiness of the devil many a diverting anecdote is
told in this same book of " Table-Talk ; " and I cannot
forbear here quoting one of these

"Dr. Martin Luther related that one day certain boon
companions were sitting together in a tavern. N"ow
amongst them was a wild disorderly fellow, who said,
were any one to offer him a stoup of good wine, he was
ready to sell his soul therefor.

" A little while afterwards there comes into the room
one that seats himself beside him that had been so fool-
hardy, drinks with him, and amidst other talk, says to
him ' Listen, said'st thou not but a little ago, if any one
should give thee a stoup of wine thou would'st sell him
thy soul therefor?'

38 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

" Then said the other ' Yea, and I hold to it ; let me
drink and carouse and be right merry to-day.'

"The man, who was the devil, said 'Yes/ and soon
slipped away again from him. Now when this same drinker
had passed the whole day jovially, and had at last become
drunk, then the aforesaid man, the devil, returns, seats
himself again beside him, and says to the other topers
' Good sirs, what think you ; when one buys a horse, do
not saddle and bridle also become his ? ' They were all
taken with great fear. At last the man said, < Come, tell
me without more ado/ Then they all avowed it was so,
and said, ' Yea, saddle and bridle also are his/ Whereupon
the devil takes hold of that same wild unruly fellow and
carries him off through the roof, and no one could tell
whither he went/'

Although I entertain the highest respect for our great
master, Martin Luther, still I cannot but think he has
quite mistaken the character of the devil. The devil does
not look upon the body with such contempt as is here
represented. And, however evil-spoken of the devil may
be, he can never be accused of being a spiritualist.

But Martin Luther misjudged the sentiments of the
Pope and the Catholic Church even more seriously than
he did those of the devil. In my strict impartiality, I
must take the two former, as I have taken the devil under
my protection, against the all -too-zealous man. In truth,
if asked as a matter of conscience, I should admit that
Pope Leo X. was in reality far more reasonable than
Luther ; and that the Reformer had quite misunderstood
the fundamental principles of the Catholic Church. For
Luther did not perceive that the idea of Christianity, the
annihilation of the life of the senses, was too violent a
contradiction of human nature ever to be capable of com-
plete realisation. He did not comprehend that Catho-
licism was a species of concordat between God and the

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 39

devil, between spirit and matter, whereby the autocracy
of the spirit was theoretically admitted, whilst matter was
placed in the position of carrying out in practice all its
annulled rights. Hence a subtle system of concessions
devised by the Church for the benefit of the senses, though
so conceived as to stigmatise every act of sensuality and
to preserve to the spirit its arrogant usurpation. Thou
art permitted to lend an ear to the tender emotions of the
heart and to embrace a pretty girl, but thou must ac-
knowledge that it is an abominable sin, and for this sin
thou must do penance. That such penance might take
the form of money payment was as advantageous for
humanity as it was profitable for the Church. The Church
ordained, so to speak, a ransom to be paid for every fleshly
indulgence ; and thus was established a tariff for every
species of sin. There were religious pedlars offering for
sale throughout the land, in the name of the Komish
Church, indulgences for every taxable sin. Such a pedlar
was Tetzel, upon whom Luther made his first onslaught.
Our historians hold the opinion that this protest against
the traffic in indulgences was an insignificant event, and
that it was only through Romish obstinacy that Luther
(whose zeal was at first directed merely against an eccles-
iastical abuse) was driven to attack the authority of the
Church in its most important position. But this is cer-
tainly an error ; indulgence-mongering was not an abuse,
it was a consequence of the whole ecclesiastical system,
and in attacking it Luther attacked the Church itself, and
the Church must condemn him as a heretic. Leo X., the
subtle Florentine, the disciple of Politian, the friend of
Raphael, the Greek philosopher with the tiara conferred
on him by the conclave, possibly because he was suffering
from a disease in no wise caused by Christian abstinence,
and which was still very dangerous how must this Leo
de Medicis have laughed at the poor, chaste, simple monk

40 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

who imagined the Gospel to be the charter of Christen-
dom, and that this charter must be a truth ! He may
perhaps have quite overlooked what Luther was seeking,
much busied as he then was with the building of St.
Peter's, the cost of which was to be defrayed by this very
sale of indulgences, vice being thus made contributory to
the erection of this edifice, which thereby became a kind
of monument of sensual desire, like the pyramid of Eho-
dope, constructed by an Egyptian courtesan from the
profits of prostitution. Of this house of God it may with
more justice be asserted than of the Cathedral of Cologne,
that it was built by the devil. This triumph of spiritu-
alism, that compelled sensualism to rear for it its fairest
temple; that derived from innumerable concessions
granted to the flesh, the means of glorifying the spirit
this triumph was a thing incomprehensible in the German
North. For there, more easily than under the glowing
sky of Italy, it was possible to practise a Christianity that
makes the least possible concessions to sensuality. We
Northerners are of colder blood, and we needed not so
many indulgences for carnal sins as were sent by Leo in
his fatherly concern for us. Our climate facilitates the
practice of Christian virtues; and on the 3ist October,
1516, as Luther nailed his theses against indulgences to
the door of the Augustin Church, the moat that sur-
rounded Wittenberg was perhaps already frozen over, and
one could have skated on it, which is a very cold sort
of pleasure, and consequently no sin.

I have been making use repeatedly of the words
spiritualism and sensualism. I shall explain them later
on when I come to speak of German philosophy. It suf-
fices here to remark that I do not employ these expres-
sions to designate philosophical systems, but merely to
distinguish two social systems of which one, spiritualism,
is based on the principle that it is necessary to annul all

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 41

the claims of sense in order to accord exclusive authority
to the spirit ; that it is necessary to mortify, to stigmatise,
to crush the flesh that we may the better glorify the soul :
whilst the other system, sensualism, revindicates the rights
of the flesh, which neither ought to be nor can be abrogated. 3
The beginnings of the Reformation revealed at once
the whole extent of its range. No Frenchman has ever
yet comprehended the significance of this great event.
The most erroneous ideas prevail in Prance regarding the
Eeformation ; and I must add that these views will per-
haps prevent Frenchmen ever arriving at a just apprecia-
tion of German life. 4 The French understood only the
negative side of the Eeformation ; they beheld in it merely
a war against Catholicism, and often imagined that the
combat that took place on the opposite side of the Rhine
was waged with the same motives as a similar combat
here in France. But the motives were totally different.
The conflict with Catholicism in Germany was nothing
else than a war begun by spiritualism when it perceived
that it possessed merely the title of authority and ruled
only de jure, whilst sensualism by means of a long estab-
lished system of fraud was exercising actual sovereignty
and was governing de facto. The retailers of indulgences
were expelled, the fair concubines of the priests were
replaced by cold legitimate spouses, the alluring images
of the Madonna were dashed to pieces and a Puritanism
utterly hostile to all pleasures of the senses took possession
of the land. The conflict with Catholicism in France
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, on
the contrary, a war begun by sensualism, when, though
de facto sovereign, it beheld every act of its authority
derided as illegitimate, and reviled in the most cruel
manner by a spiritualism that existed only de jure. But
whereas in Germany the battle was waged with chaste
earnestness, in France it was fought with wanton jests,

42 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

and whilst yonder men engaged in theological discussions,
here they composed merry satires. Usually the object of
these satires was to show the contradiction into which
man falls when he seeks to be wholly spiritual: hence
delicious stories of pious men succumbing involuntarily
to sensual appetites, or striving to save the appearance of
sanctity by taking refuge in hypocrisy. The Queen of
Navarre had already portrayed in her novels such per-
plexities. Her customary theme is the relation of monks
to women, and her aim is not merely to convulse with
laughter but to shake the foundations of monasticism.
Moli&re's "Tartuffe" is indisputably the most malicious
production of this merry polemic; for this comedy is
directed not merely against the Jesuitism of its age but
against Catholicism itself, nay, against the idea of Chris-
tianity, against spiritualism. Tartuffe's paraded dread of
the naked bosom of Dorine, his language to Elmire :

"Le del defend, de vrai, certains contentements,
Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements : "

all these things tend to bring into ridicule not only
ordinary hypocrisy, but also the universal falsehood that
necessarily arises from the impossibility of carrying out
the Christian idea, along with the whole system of con-
cessions that spiritualism is forced to make to sensualism.
Truly, the Jansenists had far greater cause than the Jesuits
for feeling aggrieved at the performance of the comedy of
" Tartuffe," and Moliere may well be as insupportable to
Protestant Methodists of our day as he was to the Catholic
devotees of his own time. It is this that makes Moliere
so grand ; for, like Aristophanes and Cervantes, he ridicules
not merely the eccentricities of his contemporaries, but the
eternal absurdities and the primal weaknesses of humanity,
Voltaire, whose attacks were always upon things temporary
and unessential, stands in this respect far below Moli&re.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 43

But this species of ridicule, the Voltairean, has fulfilled
its mission in France, and any attempt to continue it
would be both unseasonable and impolitic. For were it
sought to extirpate the last visible remnants of Catholicism
it might readily happen that the idea of Catholicism would
assume a new form, clothe itself with a new body, and
laying aside the very name of Christianity might, thus
transformed, become more vexatious and oppressive than
in its present shattered, ruined, and discredited condition.
Yea, it is not without its advantage that spiritualism is
represented by a religion that has already lost the better
part of its strength, and by a priesthood that is in complete
antagonism with the enthusiasm for liberty that charac-
terises our time.

But why then is spiritualism so repugnant to us ? Is
it so bad a thing ? By no means ! Attar of roses is a
precious thing, and a phial of this essence is refreshing for
those that are obliged to wear out their days in the closed
chambers of a harem. But we would not that all the
roses of this life should be crushed and trampled down in
order to obtain a few drops of such essence, however great
the solace it might afford. We resemble rather the
nightingales that delight in the roses themselves and
derive as great an ecstasy from their crimson blossoming
as from their ethereal perfume.

I have asserted that the attack upon Catholicism in
Germany was delivered by spiritualism. But this applies
only to the commencement of the Reformation. As soon
as spiritualism had made a breach in the old edifice of the
Church, sensualism with all its long restrained fervour of
passion threw itself into it, and Germany became the
tumultuous arena of combatants intoxicated with liberty
and sensual delights. The oppressed peasantry had found
in the new doctrine intellectual weapons with which to
wage war against the aristocracy ; for centuries they had

44 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

nourished the desire for such a combat. At Minister
sensualism, in the person of John of Leyden, ran naked
through the streets and laid itself down with its twelve
wives in the huge bed, to be seen to this day, in the
council house of the town. Everywhere the doors of
monasteries flew open, and monks and nuns rushed billing
and cooing into each other's arms. In truth the history of
Germany at this time consists of little else than sensualistic
riots. We shall presently see how small was the result of
this reaction, how spiritualism succeeded in overpowering
these rioters, how it gradually secured its authority in the
north, and how it was mortally wounded by philosophy,
the enemy that it had nurtured in its bosom. It is a very
complicated history, most difficult to unravel. For the
Catholic party it is easy to assign at pleasure the worst
motives ; and to hear them speak one would suppose that
the sole objects were to legitimise the most shameless
sensuality and to plunder the goods of the Church.
Doubtless in order to obtain the victory intellectual
interests must always form an alliance with material
interests ; but the devil had so oddly shuffled the cards
that it is now impossible to affirm with certainty anything
about intentions.

The illustrious personages who, on the I7th of April,
1521, were assembled in the Diet Hall at Worms might
well cherish in their hearts many a thought at variance
with the words on their lips. There sat a young Emperor,
who, as he wrapped himself with the ecstasy of youthful
sovereignty in the folds of his new purple mantle, secretly
rejoiced that the proud Eoman Pontiff who had so often
dealt hardly with his imperial predecessors, nor had even
yet resigned his arrogant pretensions, was about to receive
a most effectual reprimand. The representative of the
proud Eoman had, on his side, ground for secret joy that
disunion had betrayed itself amongst those Germans, who,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 45

like drunken barbarians, had so often invaded and plun-
dered fair Italy, and still threatened her with new inva-
sions and plunderings. The temporal princes rejoiced that,
whilst embracing the new doctrine, they might at the same
time work their will with the old Church domains. High
prelates began to reflect whether they might not marry
their cooks, and transmit their electoral dignities, bishop-
rics, and abbacies to their male offspring. The towns'
deputies rejoiced at the prospect of increased independence.
Each had here something to gain, and the secret thoughts
of each were directed to earthly advantages.

But one man was there of whom I am convinced that
he regarded not his own, but the Divine interests which
he represented. This man was Martin Luther, the poor
monk chosen by Providence to shatter the world-empire
of Rome, against which the mightiest emperors and the
boldest sages had already vainly struggled. But Provi-
dence well knows upon what shoulders it lays its burdens.
Here, not only spiritual, but also physical power was
necessary. It needed a frame steeled from youth upwards
in monastic chastity and severity to endure the hardships
of such a task. Our dear master was still very thin and
pale, insomuch that the ruddy, well-fed lords of the Diet
looked down almost with compassion on the poor emaciated
man in the monk's black dress. Yet was he quite healthy,
and his nerves were so strong that all the brilliant throng
inspired in him not the slightest fear. His lungs, too,
must have been right lusty, for, after having delivered his
long defence, he was obliged to repeat it in Latin, as the
Emperor did not understand High -German. I become
quite angry every time I think of this ; for our dear master
stood beside an open window, exposed to a draught, whilst
the perspiration dropped from his forehead. After such
long speaking, he might well feel much exhausted, and his
lips were no doubt sorely parched. The Duke of Bruns-

46 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

wick must have bethought himself that the man would be
very thirsty at least, we read that he ordered for Martin
Luther from the inn three jugs of the best Eimbeck beer.
I shall never forget this noble deed of the House of
Brunswick.

As of the Eeformation, so of its hero, you have in France
quite false ideas. The immediate cause of this failure to
comprehend the principal actor in that event lies in the
fact that Luther is not only the greatest, but that he is also
the most German, man in our history ; that in his char-
acter are united in their most intensified forms all the
virtues and all the faults of the Germans ; that he repre-
sents in his own personality the wonderful German land.
He also possessed qualities that we seldom see associated
nay, that we usually find in the most hostile anta-
gonism. He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical
man of action. His thoughts had not only wings, but also
hands. He spoke and he acted; he was not only the
tongue, but also the sword of his time. He was both a
cold, scholastic wordsifter, and an inspired, God-drunk
prophet. After a long day spent in laboriously working
out dogmatic distinctions, at evening time he would take
his flute and go out to gaze at the stars, and his soul would
dissolve in melody and devotion. This same man, who
could scold like a fishwife, could also be as gentle as a
sensitive maiden. He was often as fierce as the storm
that uproots the oak-tree, and then again he was as mild
as the breeze that caresses the violet. He was full of the
awful reverence of God, full of self-sacrificing devotion to
the Holy Spirit, he could lose himself entirely in pure
spirituality. And yet he was fully acquainted with the
glories of this earth : he knew how estimable they are ; it
was his lips that uttered the famous maxim

" Who loves ,not woman, wine, and song,
Eemainfl a fool his whole life long."

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 47

He was a complete man, I might say, an absolute man, in
whom there was no discord between matter and spirit.
To call him a spiritualist, therefore, would be as erroneous
as to call him a sensualist. How shall I describe him ?
He had in him something primordial, incomprehensible,
miraculous, such as we find in all providential men ; some-
thing naively terrible, something boorishly wise, something
lofty yet circumscribed, something invincibly daemomacal.

Luther's father was a miner at Mannsfeld, and the boy
was often with him in his subterranean workplace, in the
laboratory of the giant metals, where are the gurgling
sources of the great fountains. Perhaps the young heart
unconsciously absorbed something of the mysterious forces
of Nature, or was bewitched by the pixies. This may
have been the cause, too, why so much earthy matter, so
much of the dross of passion remained adhering to him,
which has so often been made a reproach against him.
But the reproach is unjust, for without that earthy ad-
mixture he could not have become a man of action. Pure
spirit cannot act. Do we not learn from Jung Stilling's
" Theory of Ghosts," * that spirits can indeed make them-
selves visible in distinct form and colour, and can walk,
and run, and dance, and otherwise comport themselves like
human creatures, but that they are powerless to move any
material object, even the smallest table, from its place ?

Praise to Luther ! eternal praise to the dear man whom
we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious
possessions, and on whose benefits our life still depends !
It little becomes us to complain of the narrowness of his
views. The dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant
can indeed see farther than his supporter, especially if he
puts on spectacles ; but to such a lofty survey is wanting
the elevated feeling, the giant-heart, to which we cannot
lay claim. Still less does it become us to pronounce an

* " Theorie der Geisterkunde." Tiu

48 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

austere judgment on his failings ; these failings have
profited us more than the virtues of a thousand others.
Neither the subtilty of Erasmus, nor the benignity of
Melancthon, would ever have brought us so far as the
divine brutality of Brother Martin. Yea, these very errors
to which I have already referred have borne the most pre-
cious fruits fruits that are still a solace to all humanity.
From the date of the Diet at which Luther disowned the
authority of the Pope, and publicly declared that "his
doctrine could be refuted only by an appeal to the autho-
rity of the Bible itself, or on grounds of reason," a new era
dawned in Germany. The chain by which the holy Boni-
face had bound the German Church to Eome was that day
severed. This Church, which had hitherto formed an
integral portion of the great hierarchy, broke up into reli-
gious democracies. Religion itself underwent a change ;
the Indo-Gnostic element disappears, and we see the
Judaic - Deistic element again rising into prominence.
Evangelical Christianity emerges. Whenever the most
essential claims of matter are not merely recognised, but
legitimised, religion once more becomes a truth ; the priest
becomes a man, and takes a wife and begets children as
God has ordained. On the other hand, God becomes once
more a celestial celibate; the legitimacy of His Son is
disputed ; the saints are relieved of their saintship ; the
angels have their wings clipped ; the Mother of God loses
all claim to the crown of heaven, and is forbidden to work
miracles. In fine, from this time forward, especially since
the natural sciences have made such great progress, mi-
racles cease. Be it that God is chagrined to find natural
philosophers watching His manipulations with such an air
of suspicion, or be it from some other motive ; certain it is,
that even in these latter days, wherein religion is in so
great peril, He has disdained to support it by any striking
miracle. Perhaps the new religions that He may hence-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 49

forth establish on earth are to be based solely on reason,
which indeed will be much more reasonable. At least in
the case of Saint Simonianism, which is the newest reli-
gion, no miracle has occurred, with this exception, per-
haps, that an old tailor's bill left owing by Saint Simon
himself, was paid by his disciples ten years after his death.
I still see before me the worthy P&re Olinde rising with
enthusiasm in the salle Taitbout, and exhibiting to the
astonished congregation the receipted tailor's bill. Young
grocers were amazed at such supernatural testimony ; but
the tailors began at once to believe !

Yet, if we in Germany, with the loss of miracles through
the triumph of Protestantism, also lost much else that
was poetic, we have still obtained manifold compensa-
tion. Men have become more virtuous, more noble-souled.
Protestantism has most favourably influenced that purity
of manners and that rigorous performance of duties usually
called morality ; nay, Protestantism in many communities
has taken a direction that identifies it completely with
morality. In the lives of the clergy especially do we see
a gratifying change. With the abolition of vows of
celibacy disappeared likewise the vices and debaucheries
of the monks. Amongst the Protestant clergy are often
to be found men of such exemplary virtue that even the
old Stoics would have had respect for them. One must
have travelled on foot as a poor student through North
Germany in order to know how much virtue, and, to
qualify the word virtue by a really beautiful epithet,
how much evangelical virtue is frequently to be found in
an unassuming parsonage. How often of a winter evening
have I found therein a hospitable welcome I, a stranger,
whose only recommendations were hunger and weariness !
When I had well eaten and slept soundly, and was pre-
paring on the morrow morning to set forth again, the old
pastor was sure to appear in his dressing-gown to bestow

50 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

his blessing on my journey a good act that never brought
me misfortune, His kindly and loquacious wife would
thrust into my pocket several slices of buttered bread,
which proved not less comforting. Behind the mother
stood in modest silence the fair daughters of the pastor,
with their ruddy cheeks and violet eyes, and the recollec-
tion of their timid glances kept my heart warm through-
out the whole winter day.

In declaring that his doctrine could be refuted only by
an appeal to the Bible or on grounds of reason, Luther
conceded to human intelligence the right to explain the
Scriptures, and reason was acknowledged as the supreme
judge in all religious controversies. Thus was established
in Germany spiritual freedom, or, as it is also called, free-
dom of thought. Thought became a right, and the deci-
sions of reason became legitimate. No doubt for several
centuries back men had been permitted to think and to
speak with tolerable freedom, and the scholastics had dis-
puted about matters that we can hardly conceive possible
to have been mooted in the Middle Ages. But the
explanation of this is to be found in the distinction that
was made between theological and philosophical truth, a
distinction whereby the disputants explicitly guarded
themselves against heresy. Besides, such controversies
were confined to the lecture-rooms of universities, and
were held in a Gothic and abstruse Latin of which the
people could not understand a word. The Church had,
therefore, little to fear from such discussions. Yet the
Church had never expressly sanctioned these proceedings,
and so, now and then, by way of protest, she caused a
poor scholastic to be burnt. But since Luther's time no
such distinction between theological and philosophical
truth has been recognised, and men have disputed in the
market-place, in the German popular tongue, without
reserve or fear. The princes who accepted the Keforma-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 51

tion legitimised this freedom of thought, of which one of
the most important results is German philosophy.

In fact nowhere, not even in Greece, was the human
intellect permitted to develop itself and to express its
thought so freely as in Germany from the middle of last
century till the French Eevolution. In Prussia espe-
cially an unrestrained liberty of thought prevailed. The
Marquis of Brandenburg perceived that, in becoming
the legitimate king of Prussia by mere strength of the
Protestant principle, he must maintain in its integrity
Protestant freedom of thought. Truly since those days
the state of affairs has changed, and the natural protector
of our Protestant liberty has come to an understanding
with the Ultramontane party to stifle that liberty, and to
this end has traitorously availed himself of a weapon
devised and first directed against us by the Papacy : the
censorship.

Singular! We Germans are the strongest and most
ingenious of nations. Princes of our race sit on every
European throne ; our Eothschilds govern the exchanges
over the whole earth ; our learned men are sovereigns in
all the sciences; we have invented gunpowder and the
printing-press ; and yet whoever fires off a pistol in our
country is subjected to a fine of three thalers ; and if any
of us wishes to insert in the Hamburg Correspondent these
words : " My dear spouse has given birth to a daughter
beautiful as Freedom ! " straightway Dr. Hoffmann * seizes
his red pencil and strikes out " Freedom."

Will this continue much longer ? I know not. But I
know that the question of freedom of the press, at present
so vehemently discussed in Germany, is significantly asso-
ciated with all the questions of which I have just spoken ;

* The Hamburg censor. As a ing, are not to be found in the early
matter of course, this paragraph, the German editions. TB.
one preceding it, and the one follow-

52 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

and I believe its solution will not be difficult, if we reflect
that freedom of the press is nothing else than a conse-
quence of freedom of thought, and therefore a Protestant
right. Germany has already given its best blood for
rights of this kind, and she may yet again be called upon
to enter the lists in defence of the same cause.

This remark is applicable to the question of academical
freedom, at present so passionately rousing men's minds in
Germany. Since the supposed discovery was made that
political agitation, that is to say the love of liberty, is
most rampant in the universities, it has on all sides been
insinuated to the sovereigns that these institutions ought
to be suppressed, or at least converted into ordinary
schools of instruction. New schemes have been devised,
and the pro and contra eagerly discussed. But the avowed
adversaries of the universities do not seem to have under-
stood any better than such avowed defenders as have
hitherto presented themselves, the fundamental principles
of the question. They do not comprehend that youth
everywhere, and under all forms of discipline, is animated
by enthusiasm for liberty ; and that, though the univer-
sities were closed, this enthusiasm of the young would
assert itself all the more energetically elsewhere, and this,
perhaps, in coalition with the youth of the commercial
and of the industrial classes. The defenders of the uni-
versities content themselves with showing that, with the
closing of the universities, German scientific learning also
would be swept away; that it is precisely freedom of
academic study that is of value, as affording to the young
the best opportunity for varied development : as if a few
Greek vocables, or a few rude customs, more or less, had
aught to do with the matter ! And what do princes care
about science, study, and culture if the sacred security of
their thrones is imperilled ! They would be heroic enough
to sacrifice all such relative benefits for a single absolute

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 53

good, for absolute sovereignty. For this possession has
been intrusted to them by God, and where Heaven com-
mands, all earthly considerations must give place. There
is also misunderstanding of the question on the part of the
poor professors, who defend, as well as on the part of the
delegates of authority, who attack, the universities. It is
only the Catholic propagandists in Germany that rightly
comprehend the matter. These pious obscurantists are
the most dangerous enemies of our university system,
assailing it by lying and fraud; and, when one of them
assumes the semblance of taking an affectionate interest
in the universities, some Jesuitical intrigue is speedily
revealed. Well do these cowardly hypocrites know how
much is to be won in the game. For with the fall of the
universities would fall the Protestant Church, the Church
that since the Reformation has been so dependent on the
universities that the whole Protestant Church history of
these last centuries consists almost exclusively of the
records of theological discussions of the learned at Witten-
berg, Leipzig, Tubingen, and Halle. The consistories pre-
sent but a feeble reflection of the theological faculty ; with
the disappearance of the latter they would lose all support
and all character, and sink into a desolate dependence on
the ministry, or even on the police.

But let us not indulge too freely in such melancholy
reflections, especially as we have still to speak of the
providential man by whom so great things were wrought
for the German people. I have already shown how
through him we attained the widest liberty of thought.
For Martin Luther gave us not only freedom of move-
ment, but also the means of movement. To the spirit he
gave a body ; he gave word to the thought ; he created the
German language.

This he did by translating the Bible.

The Divine Author of this book seems to have known

54 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

as well as we do that the choice of a translator is by no
means a matter of indifference. He himself chose His
translator, and endowed him with the marvellous faculty
of translating out of a dead and already buried language,
into a tongue that had not as yet come into existence.

We had, it is true, the Vulgate, which was understood,
and the Septuagint, which men were beginning to under-
stand ; but the knowledge of Hebrew was quite extinct
throughout the Christian world. Only the Jews, who
managed to conceal themselves here and there in corners
of the earth, still preserved the traditions of this language.
Like a ghost that keeps watch over some treasure in-
trusted to it during its lifetime, so this massacred nation,
this ghost-like people cowering in its obscure ghettos, kept
watch there over the Hebrew Bible. Into these evil-
reputed hiding-places German men of learning might be
seen secretly stealing down in order to discover the
treasure, to acquire a knowledge of Hebrew. As soon as
the Catholic priesthood perceived the danger that thus
threatened them, that the people might by such a side-
way attain an acquaintance with the true Word of God,
and thereby discover the Eomish falsifications, they would
fain have suppressed Jewish tradition, and they set to
work to destroy all Hebrew books. Thus began on the
banks of the Rhine that book-persecution, against which
our admirable Doctor Reuchlin so gloriously fought. The
theologians of Cologne, who were active in the matter,
particularly Hochstraaten, were by no means so devoid of
intelligence as Ulrich von Hutten, Reuchlin's valiant
champion, represents them in his Litterce Obscurorum
Virorum. They attempted nothing less than the sup-
pression of the Hebrew language. When Reuchlin was
victorious, Luther was able to begin his work. From a
letter written by him at this time to Reuchlin, Luther
seems already to have felt how important was the victory

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 55

that had been gained, gained too by one in a dependent
and difficult position, whereas he, the Augustin monk,
was perfectly independent. Very naively does Luther say
in this letter : " Ego nihil timeo, quia nihil habeo."

But how Luther succeeded in creating the language
into which he translated the Bible, remains a mystery to
me even to this hour. The old Suabian dialect had totally
disappeared, along with the chivalrous poetry of the
Hohenstaufen imperial era. The old Saxon dialect, so-
called low- German, was in use throughout only a por-
tion of Northern Germany, and despite all efforts that
have been made it has never been found possible to adapt
it to literary purposes. Had Luther employed for his
translation of the Bible the language that is spoken to-day
in Saxony, Adelung would have been right in maintaining
that Saxon, especially the dialect of Meissen, was the
true high-German, that is to say, our literary language.
But this error was long ago refuted, though I must here
draw special attention to it on account of its being still
quite current in France. Modern Saxon never was a
dialect of the Germans, as little was it so as Silesian ; the
former like the latter, having a strong Slavonian admix-
ture. I therefore frankly confess that I know not what
was the origin of the language we find in Luther's Bible.
But this I know that, through his Bible which the new-
born press, the black art, scattered by thousands of copies
amongst the people, the Lutheran language spread in a
few years over the whole of Germany, and was raised to
the rank of a written tongue. This written tongue holds
its place to this day in Germany, and gives to that politi-
cally and religiously dismembered nation a literary unity.
Such an inestimable gain may well make amends to us
for any loss in the later development of the language of
that internal expressiveness we are accustomed to find in
languages having their origin in a single dialect. There

56 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

is no want, however, of such expressiveness in the lan-
guage of Luther's Bible, and this old book is a perennial
source of rejuvenescence for our tongue. Every expres-
sion and every idiom to be found in Luther's Bible is
essentially German ; an author may unhesitatingly employ
it ; and as this book is in the hands of the poorest classes,
they have no need of any special learned instruction to
enable them to express themselves in a literary style.
This circumstance will, when the political revolution takes
place in Germany, result in strange phenomena. Liberty
will everywhere be able to speak, and its speech will be
Biblical.

Luther's original writings have also contributed to fix
the German language. Owing to their polemical passion-
ateness, they pierced deeply into the heart of his time.
Their tone is not always delicate ; but not even a religious
revolution can be made with orange blossom. Oftentimes
the stubborn tree root can be cleft only by the stubborn
wedge. In the Bible Luther's speech is always restrained
within the bounds of a certain dignity by reverence for the
ever-present Spirit of God. In his controversial writings,
on the contrary, he abandons himself to a plebeian vulgarity
that is often as repulsive as it is grandiose. His expres-
sions and his metaphors resemble the colossal stone images
to be seen in Hindoo or Egyptian temple grottos; their
gaudy colouring and fantastic hideousness both repel and
fascinate us. By reason of this uncouth granite style
the daring monk often appears like a religious Danton,
a preacher of the Mountain, who from his lofty elevation
hurls down his strange word-blocks on the heads of his
adversaries.

But more remarkable and more significant than these
prose works are Luther's poems, the hymns that budded
forth in his soul amidst the conflicts and troubles of his
days. Oftentimes they resemble a flower bloomino- on a

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 57

bare rock; oftentimes they are like a moonbeam shim-
mering across a tossing sea. Luther loved music ; he even
wrote a treatise on the art ; and his songs are extremely
melodious. In this respect also he merits the name of
the Swan of Eisleben. He was, however, anything but a
mild swan in many of the songs in which he rouses the
courage of his followers and inspires himself with fiercest
ardour for the combat. A true war-song was that defiant
lay with which he and his companions entered Worms.
The old cathedral trembled at such unwonted strains,
and the ravens were terrified in their obscure nests up in
the church towers. This song the Marseillaise Hymn of
the Reformation preserves even yet its power of inspir-
ing men, and perhaps we may ere long have need in similar
combats of the old mail-clad words :

A strong tower is the Lord our God,
A trusty shield and weapon ;
He frees us in our mighty need
From all the ills that happen.
The old and wicked fiend
Now earnestly has meaned ;
Great power, much deceit,
His dreadful armour meet ;
On earth is not his fellow.

For our own power could not avail,
We soon should find an ending ;
Yet bravely for us will prevail
The man of God's o\vn sending.
Seek'st, who this may be ]
Jesus Christ, 'tis He,
The Lord Sabaoth,
And sure no other God
For us the field mamtaineth.

And though the devils filled all lands,
Seeking our soul's devouring ;
\Ve need not greatly fear their bands,
Our help is overpowering.

58 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

The prince of this earth,
Though full of grim wrath,
Must yet fail of his plan ;
He lieth under a ban,
A mere word can overthrow him.

This word they may not take away,
N or yet have thanks for leaving ;
God's on our side with grace and power,
To Him our souls are cleaving.
Take, if ye choose, our life,
Goods, honour, child, and wife,
Let go as they may ;
Your gain's but small, we say,
The Kingdom ours remaineth. 6

I have shown how we have to thank our dear Doctor
Martin Luther for the intellectual freedom that was needed
for the development of modern literature. I have shown
how he also created for us the word, the speech wherein
this new literature might express itself. I have still to
add that he was himself the precursor of this literature ;
that our polite literature properly so-called begins with
Luther; that his spiritual songs prove themselves to be
its first important monument and already reveal its
distinctive character. Whoever would speak of modern
German literature must therefore begin with Luther, and not
with that narrow-souled citizen of Nuremberg called Hans
Sachs, as has been done through the bad faith of certain
writers of the Romantic school. Hans Sachs, the trou-
badour of the honourable guild of shoemakers, whose
master-song is but a crude parody of the ancient lays of
minstrelsy, and his dramas mere clumsy travesties of the
old mysteries; this pedantic buffoon, with his painful
aping of the free simplicity of the Middle Ages, may
perhaps be regarded as the last poet of the olden time,
but can in no sense be considered the earliest poet of the
new age. 6

PART SECOND.

IN the first part of this book we have treated of the great
religious revolution represented in Germany by Martin
Luther. We have now to speak of the philosophic revo-
lution which, as the offspring of the religious revolution,
is nothing else than the last consequence of Protestantism.

But before proceeding to relate how this revolution
found its outburst through Immanuel Kant, it is necessary
to refer to the philosophical events that preceded it abroad,
to the significance of Spinoza, to the fate of the philosophy
of Leibnitz, to the mutual relations between this philo-
sophy and religion, and to their discords. We shall, how-
ever, keep constantly in view those questions of philosophy
to which we attach a social significance, and towards whose
solution the social co-operates with the religious element.

We have here to deal with the question of the nature of
God. God is the beginning and the end of all wisdom,
say believers in their humility, and the philosopher in all
the pride of his knowledge is compelled to assent to this
pious axiom.

Not Bacon, as we are accustomed to be taught, but Een6
Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, and we shall
proceed to demonstrate very clearly the degree of affinity
between him and German philosophy.

Ken<5 Descartes is a Frenchman, and to great France
belongs the fame of the initiative. But great France, the
noisy, stirring, talkative land of the French, has never been

60 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

a fitting abode for philosophy, which perhaps will never
flourish on French soil. So assuredly felt Ren<5 Descartes,
who betook himself to Holland, to the peaceful, silent land
of track-boats and Dutchmen. Here he wrote his philoso-
phical works. Only in that country was it possible for
him to free his intellect from traditional formalism, and to
construct a complete system of philosophy out of pure
thought, indebted neither to faith nor to empiricism a
condition ever since demanded of all true philosophy.
Only in such a country could he plunge deeply enough
into the intellectual abyss to be able to surprise thought
in the ultimate grounds of self-consciousness, and thus
establish self -consciousness through the process of thought
in the world-famed axiom, Coyito, ergo sum.

But perhaps nowhere else than in Holland could Des-
cartes have ventured to teach a philosophy that conflicted
openly with every tradition of the past. To him is due
the honour of having established the autonomy of philo-
sophy : philosophy no longer needed to solicit from theo-
logy permission to think for itself ; it could now take its
place alongside the latter as an independent science. I
do not say in opposition to the latter ; for, in Descartes'
time, it was an acknowledged principle that the truths at
which we arrive through philosophy are ultimately iden-
tical with those transmitted by religion. The scholastics,
as I have already remarked, had, on the contrary, not only
conceded to religion the supremacy over philosophy, but
had also declared the latter, from the moment it came into
conflict with the dogmas of religion, to be mere futile
pastime, mere wordy contention. The prime object of the
scholastics was to express their thoughts, no matter under
what conditions. They said, " Once one is one ; " but they
added with a smile, "yet this is only another error of
human reason, which is always at fault when it leads to
contradiction of the decisions of the (Ecumenical Councils;

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 6t

'Once one is three/ and that is the absolute truth, long since
revealed to us in the name of the Father, of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost ! " The scholastics secretly formed a
philosophic opposition to the Church ; publicly, however,
they feigned the meekest submissiveness ; in many in-
stances they even fought the battles of the Church, and
paraded as attendants at its processions, somewhat as the
French deputies of the opposition did at the ceremonies of
the [Restoration.

The comedy of the scholastics lasted more than six
centuries, and it became more and more trivial. In de-
stroying scholasticism Descartes likewise destroyed the
effete opposition of the Middle Ages ; the old brooms were
worn out with long usage, they were too thickly covered
with offscourings, and the new age had need of new brooms.
After every revolution the former opposition must abdi-
cate, otherwise great follies will be perpetrated. We have
had experience of such things. In the times of which I
speak, it was not so much the Catholic Church herself as
her old adversaries, the rearguard of scholasticism, that
took up arms against the Cartesian philosophy. For not
till 1663 did the Pope anathematise this philosophy.

I may presuppose that Frenchmen are sufficiently
acquainted with the philosophy of their great countryman,
and it is here unnecessary for me to show how two doc-
trines, the most directly opposed, have both derived from
that philosophy the necessary framework of their systems.
I refer to the doctrines of Idealism and Materialism.

As these two doctrines have usually been designated,
especially in France, Spiritualism and Sensualism, and as I
am accustomed to employ these latter terms in a different
acceptation, it is necessary, in order to prevent con-
fusion of ideas, that I should more clearly define these
expressions.

Since the earliest times two opposite views have existed

62 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

regarding the nature of human thought, that is to say,
concerning the ultimate sources of intellectual cognition,
concerning the origin of ideas. Some hold that we receive
ideas only from without, that the mind is merely an empty
alembic wherein the impressions gathered in by the senses
are elaborated, much as the food we partake of is assimi-
lated in the stomach. To employ a better metaphor, this
class of thinkers considers the mind as a tabula rasa,
whereon experience is daily writing something new in
accordance with certain determined rules of caligraphy.
Others, holding the opposite view, assert that ideas are
born with man, that the human mind is the primary seat
of ideas, and that the external world, experience, and the
intermediary senses only bring us to the knowledge of
what was already present in the mind, only awaken there
the dormant ideas.

The former view has received the name of sensualism,
sometimes that of empiricism ; the latter has been called
spiritualism, sometimes also rationalism. But misconcep-
tions may easily result from this nomenclature. For these
two names, spiritualism and sensualism, have for some
time been employed to designate two social systems that
assert themselves in every manifestation of existence. We
assign, then, the name spiritualism to that outrageous
assumption of the human spirit, which, striving after ex-
clusive glorification of itself, endeavours to trample under
foot, or at least to stultify, matter. We bestow the name
sensualism on that opposition, which, revolting against
this pretension, has for its aim the rehabilitation of matter
and the vindication of the inalienable rights of the senses,
without thereby denying to the spirit its rights or even its
supremacy.

These two systems have stood opposed as far back as
human memory can reach. For in all ages are to be found
men in whom the capacity for enjoyment is incomplete,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 63

men with stunted senses and compunctious frames, for
whom all the grapes in this garden of God are sour, who
see in every paradise-apple the enticing serpent, who seek
in abnegation their triumph, and in suffering their sole joy.
On the other hand, we find in all ages men of robust
growth, natures filled with the pride of life, who fain carry
their heads right haughtily; all the stars and the roses
greet them with sympathetic smile ; they listen delightedly
to the melodies of the nightingale and of Eossini ; they are
enamoured of good fortune and of the flesh of Titian's
pictures ; and to their hypocritical companions for whom
such things are a torment, they answer, in the words of
Shakespeare's character, " Dost thou think because thou
art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ? " *

I leave, then, to these two social systems the names
Spiritualism and Sensualism. But when speaking of the
philosophical opinions regarding the origin of our know-
ledge I prefer the terms Idealism and Materialism, desig-
nating by the former the doctrine of innate ideas, of ideas
a priori, and by the latter the doctrine of cognition through
experience, through the senses, the doctrine of ideas a
posteriori.

It is a very significant fact that the idealistic side of the
Cartesian philosophy has never been successfully followed
up in France. Some celebrated Jansenists pursued for a
time this direction ; but they quickly lost themselves in
Christian spiritualism. It may have been this circum-
stance that brought discredit on idealism amongst the
French. Nations have an instinctive presentiment of
what they require in order to fulfil their mission. The

* This characteristic paragraph covered by Dr. Strodtmann, who
does not appear in any but the most suggests as the cause of its omission
recent German editions of Heine's that the quotation with which it con-
works. Heine had himself deleted eludes is employed in a different ap-
it in the original manuscript re* plication further oa Tm

64 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

French were already on the march towards that political
revolution which did not break out till the close of the
eighteenth century, and for which they had need of a
headsman's axe and of a materialistic philosophy equally
cold and keen. Christian spiritualism was a combatant in
the ranks of their enemies ; sensualism therefore became
their natural ally. French sensualists being ordinarily
materialists, the erroneous notion came to obtain that sen-
sualism was but a product of materialism. No ; sensualism
may with equal right claim to be the result of pantheism,
and as such it appears beautiful and imposing. Yet we
would not seek in the least to detract from the services
rendered by French materialism. It was an efficacious
antidote against the evil of the past, a desperate remedy
for a desperate disease, a sovereign panacea for an infected
people. French philosophers chose John Locke as their
master ; he was the saviour of whom they had need. His
" Essay on the Human Understanding" became their
gospel ; they were ready to swear by it. John Locke had
gone to the school of Descartes, and from him had learned
all that an Englishman can learn mechanics, analytical
method, and the art of reckoning. There was but one
thing that he could not understand ; namely, innate ideas.
He therefore brought to perfection the doctrine according
to which all our knowledge is derived from without by
means of experience. He reduced the human mind to a
species of calculating machine ; in his hands the whole
man became a piece of English mechanism. This also
applies to man as constructed by the disciples of Locke,
though they sought to distinguish themselves from their
master under various denominations. They had a perfect
dread of the ultimate results of their leading principle,
and the disciple of Condillac was horror-stricken at being
classed in the same category with Helvetius, even with
Holbach, or possibly with Lam^trie. Yet such a classifi-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 65

cation was inevitable, and I may therefore give to one and
all of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century,
and to their successors in our time, the name of materialists.
L'homme machine is the most consistent result of French
philosophy, and the title of this book betrays it at once as
the last word of this conception of the universe.

Mos.t of these materialists were also partisans of deism ;
for a machine presupposes a mechanician, and the highest
perfection of such a machine consists in its capacity for
recognising and appreciating the technical skill of such
an artificer, as displayed either in its own construction or
in his other works.

Materialism has fulfilled its mission in France. It is
perhaps at the present moment busy accomplishing the
same task in England ; and it is on the system of Locke
that the revolutionary sects in that country, especially
the Benthamites, the apostles of utility, take their stand.
These latter are men of powerful intellect ; they have pos-
sessed themselves of the right lever with which John Bull
may be set in motion. John Bull is a born materialist,
and his Christian spiritualism is for the most part tradi-
tional hypocrisy, or even mere material dulness ; his flesh
resigns itself because the spirit does not come to its ai3.
In Germany it is quite otherwise, and German revolu-
tionists deceive themselves in supposing that a material-
istic philosophy is favourable to their projects.

Germany has always manifested a repugnance towards
materialism; hence she remained during a century and
a half the true home of idealism. The Germans also
went to the school of Descartes, whose great disciple is
called Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. As Locke pursued the
materialistic tendency of his master, so Leibnitz followed
the idealistic tendency. In Leibnitz we find the doctrine
of innate ideas in its most decisive form. In his " New
Essays on the Human Understanding " he combated the

66 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

principles of Locke. With Leibnitz there sprang up
amongst Germans a great ardour for philosophical studies.
He awakened the minds of men, and led them into new
paths. On account of the natural suavity, the religious
sentiment that animated his writings, his opponents
became partially reconciled to the boldness of his views,
and the effect was prodigious. The hardihood of this
thinker exhibited itself especially in his theory of Monads,
one of the most remarkable hypotheses that have ever
proceeded from the brain of a philosopher. It is also the
best service he has rendered, for it embodies a presenti-
ment of the most important laws that have been accepted
by modern philosophy. The theory of monads was but a
crude method of formulating those laws that are now
proclaimed in better formulas by natural philosophers.
But here, instead of the word " law," I ought, properly
speaking, to employ the word " formula ; " for Newton
observes with great truth that what we call law in nature
has no real existence, and that it is merely formulas that
come to the aid of intelligence as explaining a succession
of phenomena in nature. Of all the works of Leibnitz,
the " Theodicee " is the one most spoken of in Germany.
Yet it is his feeblest production. This book, like several
other writings in which Leibnitz expresses his religious
sentiments, has obtained for its author an evil reputation,
and has caused him to be cruelly misunderstood. His
enemies have accused him of maudlin sentimentality and
weakness of intellect; his friends, in defending, have
proved him an accomplished hypocrite. The character of
Leibnitz was for long a subject of controversy amongst us :
the most partial critics could not absolve him from the
accusation of duplicity; his most eager detractors were
the freethinkers and the men of enlightenment. How
could they pardon in a philosopher defence of the Trinity,
eternal punishment, and the divinity of Christ! Their

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 67

tolerance did not extend so far as that. But Leibnitz
was neither fool nor knave, and by the lofty harmony of
his intellect he was well able to defend Christianity in
its integrity. I say, in its integrity, for he defended it
against semi-Christianity. He established the consistency
of the orthodox as opposed to the inconsistency of their
adversaries. More than this he never attempted. He
thus stood at that point of indifference where diverse
systems appear as merely different sides of the same truth.
Schelling afterwards acknowledged this standpoint, and
Hegel has scientifically established it as a system of
systems. In a similar manner Leibnitz engaged in an
attempt at a harmony between Plato and Aristotle. In
these latter days the attempt has been often enough
renewed. Is the problem solved ?

No, assuredly not! for this problem is nothing less
than an adjustment of the quarrel between idealism and
materialism. Plato is a thorough idealist and knows only
inborn, or rather with-born ideas; man brings his ideas
with him into the world, and when he becomes conscious
of them, they appear to him as recollections of a former
state of existence. Hence the vagueness and mysticism
of Plato : he merely recollects more or less clearly. With
Aristotle, on the contrary, everything is clear, intelligible,
certain ; for his cognitions are not reminiscences of a pre-
mundane state; he receives everything from experience,
and knows how to classify everything in the most precise
manner. He stands out therefore as the model for all
empiricists ; and the latter cannot sufficiently thank God
that He made him the teacher of Alexander, whose con-
quests afforded him so many opportunities for the advance-
ment of science ; and that his victorious scholar should
have presented him with so many thousand talents of gold
for zoological researches. The old master employed the
money very conscientiously, and was thereby enabled to

68 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

dissect numerous specimens of mammals, and to obtain a
great collection of stuffed birds ; all which afforded him
scope for the most important observations. But the great
biped which he had right before his eyes, which he had
himself reared, and which was far more remarkable than
all the rest of the world-menagerie, he unfortunately over-
looked and omitted to investigate. In fact, he has left us
totally without information regarding the nature of that
youthful king, the wonder and enigma of whose life and
deeds still awaken our amazement. What was Alexander ?
What sought he ? Was he a madman or a god ? To this
day we cannot tell. But Aristotle's information is all the
more complete concerning Assyrian quadrupeds, Indian
parrots, and Greek tragedies, which latter he also dissected.
Plato and Aristotle ! They are not merely the repre-
sentatives of two systems, they are the types of two dif-
ferent species of humanity, which since time immemorial,
under every variety of garb, have stood opposed to each
other in more or less hostile attitude. Especially through-
out the Middle Ages, and down to our own time, has the
conflict been maintained ; and the progress of this conflict
forms the essential part of Christian Church history. The
talk is always of Plato and Aristotle, though disguised
under other names. Dreamy, mystical, Platonic natures
find revealed in the depths of their being the Christian
idea and its corresponding symbols. Practical, methodical,
Aristotelian natures construct out of this idea and its
symbols a definite system, a dogma, and a worship. The
Church in the end embraces within its pale both classes
the one taking its position as a secular clergy, the other
intrenching itself in a monastic life, yet each continuing
to wage incessant warfare upon the other. In the Pro-
testant Church the same conflict exhibits itself in the
schism between pietists and the followers of orthodoxy,
who correspond in a certain degree to the mystics and the

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 69

dogmatists of Catholicism. The Protestant pietists are
mystics without imagination, and the Protestant orthodox
are dogmatists without intelligence.

We find these two Protestant parties engaged in desperate
conflict in the time of Leibnitz, whose philosophy after-
wards intervened when Christian Wolf, having made him-
self master of it, adapted it to the necessities of the time,
and, what was of the utmost importance, lectured on it in
the German language. But before speaking of this pupil
of Leibnitz, of the results of his labours, and of the later
destiny of Lutheranism, we must make mention of the
providential man who, simultaneously with Locke and
Leibnitz, formed himself in the school of Descartes, who
was for long regarded with derision and hatred, but who
in our day has been raised to the throne of intellectual
supremacy.

I speak of Benedict Spinoza.

One great genius forms itself from another less by
assimilation than by friction. One diamond polishes
another. Thus the philosophy of Descartes in no sense
originated, it merely advanced that of Spinoza. Hence
we find in the disciple the method of the master; this is
o great gain. We also find in Spinoza, as in Descartes,
a mode of demonstration borrowed from mathematics ;
this is a grievous fault. The mathematical form gives to
Spinoza's writings a harsh exterior. But this is like the
hard shell of the almond ; the kernel is all the more agree-
able. In reading Spinoza's works we become conscious of
a feeling such as pervades us at the sight of great Nature
in her most life-like state of repose ; we behold a forest
of heaven-reaching thoughts whose blossoming topmost
boughs are tossing like waves of the sea, whilst their im-
movable stems are rooted in the eternal earth. There is
a peculiar, indescribable fragrance about the writings of
Spinoza. We seem to breathe in them the air of the future.

70 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Perhaps the spirit of the Hebrew prophets still hovered
over their late-born descendant. There is, withal, an
earnestness in him, a self-conscious bearing, a solemn
grandeur of thought that certainly seems as though it
were inherited; for Spinoza belonged to one of those
martyr-families driven into exile by the most Catholic
kings of Spain. Added to this was the patience of the
Dutchman, which never belies itself either in the life or in
the writings of the man.

It is beyond a doubt that the whole course of Spinoza's
life was free from blame, and pure and spotless as the life
of his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, too, he
suffered for his doctrine ; like him he wore the crown of
thorns. Wherever a great spirit utters its thought, there
is Golgotha.

Dear reader, if ever thou shouldst visit Amsterdam, bid
some cicerone show thee the Spanish synagogue. It is a
beautiful building, having its roof resting on four colossal
pillars. In the midst stands the pulpit from which was
pronounced the curse on the despiser of the Mosaic law,
the Hidalgo don Benedict de Spinoza. On such an occa-
sion, a buck's-horn, called the Shofar, was blown. There
must be something quite terrible about this horn ; for, as
I once read in the life of Solomon Maimon, as the Rabbi
of Altona was endeavouring to lead him, the pupil of Kant,
back to the old faith, and as he stubbornly persisted in his
philosophical heresies, the Rabbi resorted to threats and,
holding up the Shofar, in quired in tones of awe, "Know'st
thou what this is ? " But when the pupil of Kant replied
with calm indifference, "It is the horn of a buck," the
horror-stricken Rabbi fell backwards on the ground.

At the excommunication of Spinoza there was a solemn
accompaniment on this horn ; he was ceremoniously ex-
pelled the communion of Israel, and declared unworthy
henceforth to bear the name of Jew. His Christian

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 71

enemies were magnanimous enough to leave him the name.
But the Jews, the Swiss-guard of Deism, were inexorable,
and the spot is still pointed out in front of the Spanish
synagogue at Amsterdam where they attempted to stab
Spinoza with their long daggers.

I could not refrain from drawing special attention to
these personal misfortunes of the man. He was trained
not merely in the lessons of the school, but also in those
of life. Herein is he distinguished from most philosophers,
and in his writings we recognise the indirect influence of
his life-training. Theology was for him something more
than a mere science. So also was politics ; for with this too
he made practical acquaintance. The father of his be-
trothed was hung for political offences in the Netherlands ;
and nowhere else in the world are people so badly hung
as in the Netherlands. You have no idea with what pre-
parations and ceremonies the operation is accompanied.
The delinquent is already dead with ennui, and the
spectator has abundant leisure for reflection. I am per-
suaded, then, that Benedict Spinoza reflected very deeply
on the execution of the old Van Ende, and as previously
he had comprehended religion with its daggers, so now he
comprehended politics with the cord. Evidence of this is
to be found in his " Tractatus Politicus."

My task consists merely in pointing out how these phi-
losophers come to be more or less nearly related, and I
confine myself to indicating their degrees of relationship
and their genealogy. The philosophy of Spinoza, third
son of Ben Descartes, as he enunciates it in his principal
work, the " Ethics," is as widely different from the mate-
rialism of his brother Locke as from the idealism of his
brother Leibnitz. Spinoza does not torment himself with
analytical inquiry into the ultimate grounds of our cogni-
tions. He gives us his grand synthesis, his explanation
of Deity.

72 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Benedict Spinoza teaches : there is but one substance,
which is God. This one substance is infinite ; it is abso-
lute : all finite substances emanate from it, are contained
in it, emerge out of it, are submerged in it; they have only
a relative, transient, accidental existence. The absolute
substance reveals itself to us as clearly in the form of
infinite thought as in the form of infinite extension. These
two, infinite thought and infinite extension, are the two
attributes of the absolute substance. We recognise only
these two attributes; but God, the absolute substance,
has perhaps many other attributes that we do not know.
" Non dico, me Deum omnino cognoscere, sed me gucedam ejus
attributa, non autem omnia, neque maximam intelligere
partem"

Nothing but sheer unreason, and malice could bestow
on such a doctrine the qualification of " atheism/' No one
has ever spoken more sublimely of Deity than Spinoza.
Instead of saying that he denied God, one might say that
he denied man. All finite things are to him but modes of
the infinite substance ; all finite substances are contained
in God ; the human mind is but a luminous ray of infinite
thought ; the human body but an atom of infinite exten-
sion : God is the infinite cause of both, of mind and of
body, natura naturans.

In a letter to Madame du Defiant, Voltaire professes
himself quite charmed at a sally of this lady's, who had
said that everything that man cannot know is assuredly
of such a nature that it would profit him nothing to know.
I might apply this remark to the passage from Spinoza
just quoted in his own words, according to which, besides
the two knowable attributes of thought and extension,
there may pertain to Deity other attributes that cannot be
known. What we cannot know has no value for us, at
least no value from a social point of view, where it is a
question of realising in sensible fact what the intellect

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 73

perceives. In our explanation of the being of God, we
have therefore regard only to these two knowable attri-
butes. And, besides, everything that we call attribute of
Deity is, after all, but a different form of our intuition,
and these different forms are identical in the absolute
substance. Thought is, after all, but invisible extension,
and extension is but visible thought. Here we come into
contact with the leading axiom of the German Philosophy
of Identity, which in reality does not differ from the doc-
trine of Spinoza. Let Schelling protest as eagerly as he
may that his philosophy is something else than Spinozism,
that it is rather " a living amalgam of the ideal and the
real," that it is distinguishable from Spinozism " as the per-
fection of Greek statuary is distinguishable from the rigid
Egyptian originals ; " I must none the less emphatically
declare that in his first period, at the time when he was
still a philosopher, Schelling is not to be distinguished in
the slightest degree from Spinoza. He has only taken a
different road to arrive at the same philosophy. I have
yet to elucidate this when I come to explain how Kant
opened up a new path, how Fichte followed him, how
Schelling, in pursuing still further the footsteps of Fichte,
having gone astray in the gloomy forest of the Philosophy
of Nature, at last found himself face to face with the great
figure of Benedict Spinoza.

The only merit of the modern Philosophy of Nature lies
in demonstrating, in the clearest manner, the eternal paral-
lelism that exists between spirit and matter. I say spirit
and matter, and I employ these expressions as equivalents
for what Spinoza calls thought and extension; I also
regard these expressions as synonymous with what our
German philosophers call spirit and nature, or the ideal
and the real.

In what follows I shall designate by the word Pan-
theism, not so much the system as the point of view of

74 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Spinoza. Pantheism, like Deism, assumes the unity of
God ; but the God of the pantheists is in the world itself,
not by informing it with his divinity, as St. Augustin
endeavoured to explain by comparing God to a great lake
and the world to a sponge floating in the middle of it
and absorbing Deity : no, the world is not merely God-
distended, God-impregnated, it is identical with God.
God, called by Spinoza the Sole Substance, and by Ger-
man philosophers the Absolute, " is All that is ; " He is
matter as well as spirit, both are equally divine, and he
that insults the sanctity of matter is as impious as he
that sins against the Holy Ghost.

The God of the pantheists, then, is distinguished from
the God of the deists by being in the world itself, whereas
the latter is outside of, or, what is the same thing, is above
the world. The God of deism governs the world from
above as an establishment apart from him. It is only
with regard to the mode of this government that deists
differ among themselves. The Hebrews conceive God as a
tyrant armed with thunder ; Christians, as a loving father ;
the disciples of Eousseau and the whole Genevese school,
regard him as a skilful artist, who has fashioned the world
somewhat as their fathers constructed watches, and as
experienced critics they admire the work and praise the
celestial workman.

In the eyes of the deist, who assumes an extra-mundane
or supra-mundane God, the spirit alone is holy, because he
regards it as the divine breath which the Creator of the
universe has breathed into the human body, the work of
his hands formed of the dust of the earth. Hence the Jews
looked on the body as a despicable thing, as the pitiful en-
velope of the Rouach hakodasch, of the divine breath, of the
spirit ; and to the latter only would they accord considera*
tion, reverence, and worship. The Jews are therefore in quite
a special sense the people of the spirit, chaste, temperate,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 75

serious, abstract, stiff-necked, fit to be martyrs ; and their
sublimest flower is Jesus Christ. He is, in the true sense of
the word, the incarnate spirit ; and full of deepest signi-
ficance is the beautiful legend that he is the offspring of a
pure virgin conceived by the sole operation of the Spirit.

But if the Jews regarded the body merely with con-
tempt, Christians, the Ultras of spiritualism, have gone
much farther on the same road, and look upon the body
as something to be reprobated, as wicked, as the evil
thing itself. Thus, several centuries after the birth of
Christ we see a religion arise that will form an eternal
subject of astonishment to the historian, and that will
compel the shuddering amazement of latest generations.
Yes, Christianity is a grand, a holy religion, full of infinite
blessedness, a religion that seeks to conquer for the spirit
the most absolute domination on earth. But such a
religion was far too sublime, far too pure, far too good for
this world, where its idea could only be proclaimed in
theory, but could never be realised in practice. The
attempt to realise it has produced in human history an
infinite number of heroic deeds, which will afford to poets
of all ages ample themes for story and song. But the
endeavour to realise the Christian idea has, as we at last
come to see, most lamentably failed, and the abortive
attempt has cost humanity incalculable sacrifices ; sacri-
fices whose calamitous effects are visible in the social dis-
temper that afflicts all Europe at the present day. If, as
many believe, humanity is still in its adolescence, then
Christianity is doubtless one of the most generous illu-
sions of youth, though it does far more honour to the
heart than to the head. Christianity having abandoned
to Caesar and to his Jewish chamberlains matter and all
temporal things, contented itself with denying the supre-
macy of the former, and with stigmatising the latter in
public opinion. But lo ! the detested sword and the

76 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

despised riches obtain in the end supreme power, and the
representatives of spiritualism are obliged to come to an
understanding with them. Yes, and this understanding
has even become a mutual alliance. Not the priests of
Rome only, but those also of England and of Prussia, in
short, all privileged priesthoods have associated them-
selves with Caesar and his confederates for the oppression
of the peoples. The result of this alliance is but to
hasten the overthrow of the religion of spiritualism. A
portion of the priesthood already comprehends this, and
in order to save religion they assume the pretence of
renouncing the pernicious alliance and seek to range
themselves in our ranks by adopting our colours.

Vain efforts, futile endeavours ! Humanity yearns after
more solid food than the symbolic blood and flesh of the
Eucharist. Humanity smiles compassionately at the
ideals of its youth, that have failed in realisation in spite
of all its painful attempts ; and it grows manfully prac-
tical. Humanity in our day worships a system of earthly
utility ; it has serious thoughts about establishing itself in
citizen prosperity, about a reasonably ordered household,
about securing comfort for its old age. The thing of prime
importance at the moment is its restoration to health, for
we still feel a great weakness in all our members; the
holy vampires of the Middle Ages have sucked out of us
so much life-blood ! And after this it will still be neces-
sary to offer grand expiatory sacrifices to matter, in order
to atone for old offences against it. It might even be
expedient to institute holy-day revels, and to indemnify
matter for its past sufferings ; for Christianity, unable to
annihilate, has on all occasions sought to bring disgrace
upon matter : it has depreciated the noblest delights, the
senses have been forced to become hypocritical, and
everywhere there has been deceit and sin. We must
reclothe women in new chemises and in new sentiments,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 77

and all our emotions must be passed through a process of
disinfection as after having undergone the ravages of a
plague.

Thus the immediate aim of all our modern institutions
is the rehabilitation of matter, its restoration to former
dignity, its moral recognition, its religious sanetification,
its reconciliation with the spirit ; Purusa is re-wedded to
Pakriti ; from their violent separation, as the Indian myth
so ingeniously symbolises, the great laceration of the world,
Evil, has arisen.

Can you tell us, then, what the evil of the world signi-
fies ? The spiritualists have always made it a reproach
against us that, in the pantheistic view, the distinction
between good and evil is lost. But evil is in part merely
an erroneous conception of the world by the spiritualists ;
and in part it is an actual product of their arrangement
of mundane affairs. According to their view, matter is
in itself an evil thing ; which is surely nothing less than
a calumny and fearful blasphemy against God. Matter
becomes evil only when it is forced into secret conspiracy
against the usurpation of the spirit, when it is stigmatised
by the spirit and then degrades itself through loss of self-
respect, or when with the hatred of despair it avenges
itself on the spirit ; and thus evil is a result of the arrange-
ment of the world by the spiritualists.

God is identical with the world : he manifests himself
in plants, which unconsciously live a cosmic-magnetic
life; he manifests himself in animals which, in the dream
of their sensuous life, experience an existence more or less
torpid. But he manifests himself most gloriously in man,
who feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable of
distinguishing his own individuality from objective nature,
whose intellect already bears within itself the ideas that
present themselves to him in the phenomenal world. In
man Deity reaches self-consciousness, and this self-con-

78 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

sciousness Deity again reveals through man. But this
revelation does not take place in and through individual
man, but in and through collective humanity ; and this in
such wise that each man comprehends and represents but a
portion of the God-universe ; whereas collective humanity
comprehends and represents in idea and in reality the whole
God-universe. Every nation is perhaps endowed with
the mission of recognising and manifesting a portion of
this God-universe, of comprehending a series of facts and
of realising a series of ideas, and of transmitting the result
to succeeding races on whom a like mission is imposed.
God is therefore the real hero of universal history ; history
is but his eternal thought, his eternal action, his word,
his deed; and of entire humanity we may justly say it is
an incarnation of God.

It is an error to suppose that this religion, Pantheism,
leads men to indifference. On the contrary, the conscious-
ness of his divinity will inspire man with enthusiasm for
its manifestation, and from this moment will the really
noble achievements of true heroism glorify the earth.

The political revolution, based on the principles of French
materialism, will find in the pantheists not opponents but
allies ; allies, however, who have drawn their convictions
from a deeper source from a religious synthesis. We
promote the welfare of matter, the material happiness of
nations, not, like the materialists, from a contempt for the
spirit, but because we know that the divinity of man reveals
itself also in his corporeal form, that misery destroys or
debases the body, God's image, and that thereby the spirit
likewise is involved in ruin. The great word of the revo-
lution pronounced by St. Just, "Bread is the right of
the people," is translated by us, " Bread is the divine
right of man/' We are fighting not for the human rights
of the people, but for the divine rights of humanity. In
this and in much else we differ from the men of the revo-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 79

lutioji. We do not wish to be sans-culottists, nor frugal
citizens, nor unassuming presidents ; we are for founding a
democracy of terrestrial gods, equal in glory, in blessed-
ness, and in sanctity. You demand simple modes of dress,
austere morals, and unspiced pleasures ; we, on the con-
trary, desire nectar and ambrosia, purple mantles, costly per-
fumes, luxury and splendour, dances of laughing nymphs,
music and comedies. Be not therefore angry with us,
virtuous republicans ! To your censorious reproaches
we reply in the words of Shakespeare's character:
" Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall
be no more cakes and ale ? "

The Saint Simonians comprehended and desired some-
thing analogous ; but the soil was unfavourable, and they
were repressed, for the time at least, by the surrounding
materialism. They have been better appreciated in Ger-
many, for Germany is now the fertile soil of pantheism.
This is the religion of our greatest thinkers, of our best
artists, and in Germany deism, as I shall presently explain,
was long ago theoretically destroyed. No one says it, but
every one knows it : pantheism is the open secret of Ger-
many. We have, in fact, outgrown deism. We are free,
and we \vant no thundering tyrants; we have reached
majority and can dispense with paternal care. .Neither
are we the work of a great mechanician. Deism is a
religion for slaves, for children, for Genevese, for watch-
makers.

Pantheism is the occult religion of Germany, and this
.result was foreseen by those German writers who, fifty
years ago, let loose their zealotry against Spinoza. The
most furious of these adversaries of Spinoza was F. H.
Jacobi, who is occasionally honoured by being ranked
among German philosophers. He was but a gossiping old
woman, disguised in the mantle of philosophy, who, having
insinuated himself amongst philosophers, began by whin-

80 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

ing to them about his affection and his sensibility, and
ended by inveighing against reason. His perpetual refrain
was, that philosophy, knowledge acquired by reason, was
a vain illusion; that reason herself knew not whither she
led ; that she but conducted mankind into a dark labyrinth
of error and contradiction ; and that faith alone was their
sure guide. Mole that he was, he saw not that reason,
like the eternal sun, whilst pursuing in the heavens an
appointed course, illumines its path with its own rays.
Nothing can compare with the fanatical hatred of the
little Jacobi towards the great Spinoza.

It is curious to observe how the most opposite parties
arrayed themselves against Spinoza. The aspect of this
army of adversaries is highly amusing. Near a swarm of
black and white Capuchins bearing cross and censer,
marches the phalanx of the Encyclopaedists, who also
take aim at this " daring thinker " (penseur temeraire) ;
by the side of the Rabbi of the synagogue of Amsterdam,
who sounds the attack with the sacred buck's-horn, ad-
vances Arouet de Voltaire playing obligato on the shrill
pipe of irony for the benefit of deism ; in the midst
whimpers the old woman Jacobi, the sutler of this army
of the faith.

Let us escape as quickly as possible from this charivari.
Returning from our pantheistic excursion we come back
to the Leibnitzian philosophy, of whose ulterior destiny in
Germany we have now to speak.

In writing his works, which are familiar to you,
Leibnitz employed partly the Latin and partly the French
language. Christian Wolf is the name of the admirable
man who not only systematically taught the ideas of
Leibnitz, but did so in the German language. His real
merit consists not in having formulated Leibnitzian ideas in
a solid system, still less does it consist in rendering them
accessible to a wider public by translation into German :

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Bi

his special merit lies in having incited us to philosophise
in our mother-tongue. Till Luther's time we were unable
to treat of theology except in Latin ; till the time of Wolf
we were obliged to philosophise in that language. The
example of a few rare scholars, who had previously
essayed to teach such subjects in German, led to no re-
sult. Yet the literary historian must accord to these few
a special eulogy. In particular, we recall John Tauler, 7 a
Dominican monk, who was born at the beginning of the
fourteenth century on the banks of the Rhine, and died
at Strasburg in 1361. He was a pious man, one of that
body of mystics whom I have designated the Platonic
party of the Middle Ages. In the last years of his life
this man, renouncing all pride of learning, was not ashamed
to preach in the humble language of the people ; and these
sermons, which he committed to writing, as well as German
translations of some of his former homilies in Latin, are
to be reckoned amongst the monuments of the German
language. For this language already proved itself not
only appropriate for metaphysical investigations, but also
far better adapted for this purpose than Latin. This
latter, the language of the Romans, can never belie its
origin. It is a language of command for generals ; a
language of decree for administrators; an attorney lan-
guage for usurers; a lapidary speech for the stone-hard
Eoman people. It became the appropriate language of
Materialism. Though Christianity, with true Christian
patience, tormented itself for more than a thousand years
with the attempt to spiritualise this tongue, its efforts
remained fruitless ; and when John Tauler sought to
fathom the awful abysses of thought, and his heart over-
flowed with religious emotion, he was impelled to speak
German. His speech is like a mountain spring that wells
forth from the granite rock, marvellously impregnated
with strange aroma and mysterious metallic virtues. It

82 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

was not, however, till recent times that the rare appro-
priateness of German for philosophic purposes became
fully apparent. In no other language than in our dear
German mother-tongue could Nature have revealed her
most intimate secret. Only on the robust oak can the
sacred mistletoe thrive.

This would indeed be the fitting place to speak of
Paracelsus, or, as he styled himself, Aureolus Theophrastus
Paracelsus Bombastus of Hohenheim; for he also wrote
chiefly in German. But I shall have occasion to speak
of him later on from a still more important standpoint.
His philosophy was what in our day we call the Philo-
sophy of Nature ; and this doctrine of a nature animated
by ideas, so mysteriously according with the spirit of
German thought, would have taken root amongst us in
the time of Paracelsus, had not the lifeless and mecha-
nical theories of the Cartesians, through foreign influence,
usurped universal authority. Paracelsus was a great
charlatan, always tricked himself out in scarlet coat and
breeches, red stockings and a red hat, and asserted that
he had power to create little men, homunculi ; at any rate
he stood on the most familiar footing with the invisible
beings that people the various elements. Yet he was also
one of the profoundest of naturalists, who, with an ardour
for investigation altogether German, comprehended pre-
Christian popular beliefs, German pantheism, and what
he did not know he very accurately divined.

Of Jacob Bohme I ought also to say something. He
too applied the German language to philosophical demon-
strations, for which he has been much praised. But I
have never yet been able to bring myself to read his
works. I do not like being made a fool of. I have,
in fact, a suspicion that the panegyrists of this mystic
have a desire to mystify the public. As regards the
nature of his speculations, Saint Martin has given you a

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 83

taste in French. In England also his works have been
translated. Charles I. had so high an opinion of this
theosophical shoemaker that he sent expressly a man of
learning to Gorlitz in order to study him. This learned
man was more fortunate than his royal master ; for whilst
the latter lost his head at Whitehall under Cromwell's axe,
the former merely lost his reason at Gorlitz through the
theosophy of Jacob Bohme, 8

As I have said, Christian Wolf first successfully applied
the German language to philosophy. His least merit was
the reducing to a system and the popularising of Leib-
nitzian ideas. In both of these respects he has incurred
the gravest censure, a censure that must not be passed
over in silence. His systematising was merely a deceptive
appearance and the most important element of the philo-
sophy of Leibnitz the best part of the theory of monads
was sacrificed to this appearance. Leibnitz had, it
is true, left behind him no systematic edifice, only the
necessary ideas towards its construction. It needed the
might of a giant to fit together t^itfcolossal blocks and
columns that a giant had raised from the deep marble
quarries of thought and had hewn into symmetrical form.
The result might have been a magnificent temple; but
Christian Wolf was far too short of stature, and was
unable to possess himself of more than a portion of the
materials, with which he patched together a miserable
tabernacle of deism. Wolf's intellect was more encyclo-
paedic than systematic; he could not comprehend the
unity of a doctrine except as a completed whole. He was
content with the construction of a cabinet in which the
compartments were arranged in the most orderly manner,
conveniently filled, and legibly ticketed. In this way he
has given us an Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.
As descended from Descartes through Leibnitz, it is easy
to understand that he inherited from his grandfather

84 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

the mathematical form of demonstration, I have already
reprobated this mathematical form in Spinoza. In the
hands of Wolf it became a source of great mischief;
amongst his disciples it degenerated into insufferable
methodising and a ludicrous mania for demonstrating
everything in mathematical fashion. Thus arose the so-
called dogmatism of Wolf. All profound investigation
ceased and was replaced by wearisome zeal for perspi-
cuity; the philosophy of Wolf became more and more
aqueous and finally inundated all Germany. The traces
of this deluge are visible even down to our own day, and
here and there on our most sterile academical summits
may still be found old fossils of the Wolfian school

Christian Wolf was born at Breslau in 1679, and died
at Halle in 1754. His intellectual supremacy in German
lasted during more than half a century. His relation to
German theologians deserves special attention, and a notice
of it forms the complement to our sketch of the fate of
Lutheranism.

No field in the whole history of the Church is more
perplexing than the quarrels of Protestant theologians
since the Thirty Years' War. They can only be compared
with the puerile wranglings of the Byzantines. Yet the
latter were less wearisome, for behind them were con-
cealed political interests and court intrigues, whereas
Protestant polemics were traceable, for the most part,
to the pedantry of narrow-minded dons and freshmen.
The universities, especially Tubingen, Wittenberg, Leipzic,
and Halle, are the arenas of these theological combats.
The two parties, whom we have seen contending in Catholic
costume throughout the entire Middle Ages the Platonists
and the Aristotelians have merely changed their mode
of dress, and continue to wrangle as before. These are
the pietists and the orthodox, of whom I have already
spoken, and whom I designated as mystics without imagi-

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 85

nation and as dogmatists without intelligence. Philipp
Jakob Spener* was the Scotus Erigena of Protestantism;
and as the latter, by his translation of the legendary
Dionysius the Areopagite, became the founder of Catholic
mysticism, the former by his Conventicles for Edification,
Collegia pietatis,tTom which, perhaps, the name "Pietists"
still remains amongst his followers, founded Protestant piet-
ism. He was a godly man, reverence be to his memory.
A Berlin Pietist, F. Horn, has written an excellent bio-
graphy of him. The life of Spener was an incessant martyr-
dom for the Christian idea. In this respect he was pre-
eminent among his contemporaries. He enforced the
merits of godliness and good works ; he was a preacher of
the spirit rather than of the word. His homilies are very
laudable, considering his time ; for, all theology, as taught
in the universities just mentioned, consisted in mere
strait-laced dogmatism and hair-splitting polemic: exe-
gesis and the study of Church history were completely
ignored.

One of Spener's pupils, Hermann Franke, began to
lecture at Leipzic after the example and method of his
teacher. He read in German, a merit we are always
ready to acknowledge with gratitude. The approbation
with which these lectures were received excited the envy
of his colleagues, and thus caused much bitterness in the
life of our poor Pietist. Obliged to quit the field, he
betook himself to Halle, where he taught Christianity by
word and deed. His memory is there imperishable, for
he was the founder of the Orphan Institute of Halle. The
university of Halle soon became the headquarters of the

* In all the German editions, manner in which his works were

and even in the latest edition of the printed ; and his letters to Campe,

French version, the founder of the the publisher, are full of reproaches

Pietists is erroneously caUed Jo- on the subject. Collegia pietatit is

hanncs Spener. Heine had frequent transformed in all the editions into

pccaaion to complain of the careless Colloquia pietatit. TB.

86 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Pietists, who were called " the Sect of the Orphanage "
(" WaisenTiauspartei "). Let it be said, in passing, that
this sect flourishes there till the present day; Halle is
still the mole-hill of the Pietists, whose quarrels with
the rationalist Protestants created but a few years ago
a scandal that became noised abroad throughout the
whole of Germany. Happy Frenchmen, who have heard
nothing of all this ! You have remained ignorant of even
the existence of those tattling evangelical journals in
which the pious fishwives of the Protestant Church so
lustily abused one another. Happy Frenchmen, who can
form no idea of the malice, the pettiness, the bitterness
with which our evangelical clergy can traduce one another !
You know that I am no partisan of Catholicism. In
the present state of my religious convictions there still
survives, not indeed the dogmatism, but the spirit of Pro-
testantism.* I still retain, therefore, my partiality for the
Protestant Church ; and yet must I honestly confess that
nowhere in the annals of the Papacy have I discovered
anything so contemptible as might be found in "The
Berlin Evangelical Church Eecord " during the progress
of this quarrel. The most dastardly knavery of the monks,
the meanest intrigues of the cloister, are noble and gene-
rous compared to the Christian exploits of our pietist and
orthodox Protestants during their combat with the hated
Eationalists. You Frenchmen have no idea of the hatred

* In the French version the fol- Protestantism consists in the fact

lowing is substituted for this sen- that I was inscribed as an evangelical

tcnce : " Protestantism was for me Christian in the church registers of

more than a religion, it was a mis- the Lutheran communion. But a

aion ; and for fourteen years I have secret predilection for the cause in

been fighting in its interests against which we formerly fought and suf-

the machinations of the German fered always continues to nestle in

Jesuits, My sympathy for dogma our hearts, and my present religious

has, it is true, of late become ex- convictions are still animated by the

tinguished, and I have frankly de- spirit of Protestantism." TE.
clared in my writings that my whole

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 87

that is displayed on such occasions ; for the Germans are
more vindictive than the peoples of Latin origin. The
reason is, they are idealists even in their hatred. We
do not hate each other as you French do about outward
things, because of wounded vanity, on account of an
epigram, or of an unreturned visiting-card ; no, we hate
in our enemies the deepest, most vital possession they
have, their thought. As in your love so in your hatred,
you French are hasty, superficial. We Germans hate
thoroughly, lastingly. Too honest, perhaps too unskilful,
to revenge ourselves by speedy perfidy, we hate till our
last breath. " I have had experience, sir, of this German
tranquillity," said a lady to me not long ago, regarding me
at the same time with a look of open-eyed incredulity and
horror; " I know that in your language you employ the same
word for begging pardon and for poisoning." And indeed
she was right, the word vergeben has this twofold meaning.
It was, if I mistake not, the orthodox of Halle who, in
their disputes with the Pietist refugees, called to their
assistance the philosophy of Wolf ; for religion when it
can no longer burn us comes to beg from us an alms. Yet
all our gifts profit it but little. The mantle of mathe-
matical demonstration in which Wolf affectionately in-
vested poor Eeligion fitted her so badly that she felt more
straitened than before, and made herself very ridiculous
through her discomfort. Weak seams gave way at all
points. Original sin especially showed itself in its most
glaring nakedness. No logical fig-leaf could avail it
anything. Christian-Lutheran original sin and Leibnitz-
Wolfian optimism are incompatible. French persiflage, at
the expense of optimism, was therefore the least displeas-
ing to our theologians. Voltaire's wit came to the aid of
original sin, but the German Pangloss lost much by the
overthrow of optimism, and he searched long for a doc-
trine equally consoling until the Hegelian axiom, " All

88 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

that is, is reasonable!" afforded him some slight com-
pensation.

From the moment that a religion solicits the aid of
philosophy its ruin is inevitable. In the attempt at
defence it prates itself into destruction. Eeligion, like
every absolutism, must not seek to justify itself. Prome-
theus is bound to the rock by a silent force. Yea, ^Eschylus
permits not personified power to utter a single word. It
must remain mute. The moment that a religion ventures
to print a catechism supported by arguments, the moment
that a political absolutism publishes an official news-
paper, both are near their end. But therein consists our
triumph : we have brought our adversaries to speech, and
they must reckon with us.

It is certainly indisputable that religious, as well as
political, absolutism has found powerful organs of expres-
sions. Still do not let this alarm us. If the word lives,
it may be carried by dwarfs; if it is dead, no giant can
hold it upright.

Now, as I have just said, since Eeligion took to seeking
aid from philosophy, German scholars, besides the pro-
viding of new garments, have made all sorts of experi-
ments with her. They conceived the idea of bestowing
on her a new youth, and they attempted this somewhat
after the manner of Medea with the old king JSson.
First a vein was opened and all superstitious blood
allowed to trickle slowly out. To speak without meta-
phor, an endeavour was made to empty Christianity of all
historical content, and thus leave nothing but morality.
By this process Christianity was reduced to pure deism.
Christ ceased to be co-regent with God ; he was in a sense
mediatised, and only as a private person did becoming
reverence continue to be paid him. His moral character
was extolled beyond measure, nor could eulogy strong
enough be found to express what an excellent man he

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 89

must have been. As regards the miracles he wrought,
they were either explained according to physical theories,
or people made as little to do as possible about them.
Miracles, said some, were necessary in those superstitious
times, and a sensible man having a truth of any kind
to proclaim, made use of miracles as an advertisement.
Those theologians that sought entirely to eliminate the
historical element from Christianity were called Bation-
alists. and upon them was poured out the wrath alike of
Pietists and of the Orthodox. These sects are now less
hostile to one another, and frequently even become con-
federates. What Christian love could not do was effected
by a common hatred hatred towards the Rationalists.

This tendency in Protestant theology * began with the
peaceful Semler, whom you do not know, rose to a dis-
quieting height with the clear-sighted Teller, whom also
you do not know, and reached its culminating point with
the shallow-brained Bahrdt, in the loss of whose acquaint-
ance, you have nothing to regret. The strongest impetus
came from Berlin, where ruled Frederick the Great, and
bookseller Nicolai.

As regards the first crowned Materialism you are
sufficiently informed. You know that he composed
French verses, played very well on the flute, won the
battle of Eossbach, was a prodigious snuffer, and believed
in nothing but cannon. Some of you have doubtless
visited Sans-Souci, and the old pensioner who attends at
the castle has pointed out to you in the library the French
novels which Frederick when crown prince used to read in
church, and which he caused to be bound in black morocco
in order that his stern father might suppose him to be
reading the Lutheran hymnal. Ye know him, that royal
worldly-wise-man, whom you have named the Solomon
of the North. France was the Ophir of this northern

* The French version has, " This reform of Protestant theology." TR.

90 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Solomon, whence he obtained his poets and philosophers,
for whom he cherished great favour, just like the Solomon
of the South, who, as we read in the tenth chapter of the
First Book of Kings, got his friend Hiram to bring from
Ophir whole shiploads of gold and silver, ivory, poets, and
philosophers.* This preference for foreign talent certainly
hindered Frederick the Great from gaining any consider-
able influence over the German spirit. On the contrary,
he insulted and wounded German national feeling. The
contempt shown by him for our literature cannot but
offend us the descendants of these writers. Except old
Gellert none of them had reason to enjoy any mark of
Frederick's most gracious favour. Gellert's interview
with him is remarkable.

But if Frederick the Great jeered at us without offer-
ing to protect us, so much the more did we receive the
protection of bookseller Nicolai, without having on that
account any scruple about scoffing at him. This man
was during his whole life incessantly active for the
welfare of his country. He spared neither money nor
pains where he hoped to further a good cause ; and yet
never has any one in Germany been so cruelly, so unre-
lentingly, so utterly ridiculed as this same man. Although
we, the later-born, know right well that old Nicolai, the
friend of enlightenment, was in the main in the right ;
though we know that it was chiefly our own enemies, the
Obscurantists, that quizzed him to death, yet we cannot
think of him with perfectly grave faces. Old Nicolai
tried to do in Germany what the French philosophers had
done in France : he endeavoured to destroy the past in

* In the French version Heine elephantorum, et simias et pavos."

here quotes the Vulgate : " Classis For the " apes and peacocks," sought

regis per mare cum classe Hiram after by the wise king, Heine sub-

semel per tres annos ibat, deferens stitutes (French) "poets and philo-

inde aurum et argentum, et dentes gophers.'* TR.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 91

the spirit of the people ; a praiseworthy preparatory task,
without which no radical revolution is possible. But in
vain ; he was not robust enough for such a labour. The
old ruins still stood too securely, and the phantom of the
past arose out of them, and mocked his efforts ; then,
losing his temper, he struck blindly at them, and the spec-
tators laughed as the bats whizzed about his ears and got
entangled iu his powdered wig. Sometimes it happened
that he mistook windmills for giants, and valiantly
attacked them. But it fared worse with him when he
mistook real giants for windmills, a Wolfgang Goethe for
example. He wrote a satire on Werther in which he
utterly misapprehended its author's intentions. Yet, after
all, he was right in the main. If he did not exactly
understand Goethe's real object in Werther, he at least
comprehended very clearly the tendency of that work
the effeminate dreaminess, the barren sentimentality it
brought into vogue, which were in complete contradic-
tion to every rational feeling of which we stood in need.
Here Nicolai was entirely at one with Lessing, who wrote
to a friend the following estimate of Werther :

" In order that such an impassioned production may
not be the means of producing more evil than good, do
you not think it should have been provided with a short
but very chilling epilogue, a few hints as to the causes
that produced in Werther such a strange character, a
contrast with some other young man on whom nature had
bestowed a like temperament but who has power to over-
rule it ? Do you suppose that a Greek or Eoman youth
would ever have killed himself in such a manner and
from the same cause ? Assuredly not The latter knew
how to protect themselves in quite a different fashion
from the extravagancies of love. It was reserved for
Christianity, which can so beautifully transform a phy-
sical necessity into a spiritual perfection, to give birth to

93 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

eccentricities at once so mean and so great, so con-
temptible and so estimable. And so, dear Goethe, let us
have a short concluding chapter, and the more cynical
the better."

The worthy Nicolai has actually given us an edition of
Werther amended in accordance with this suggestion. In
this version the hero does not commit suicide, but only
smudges himself with chicken blood; for the pistol,
instead of being charged with lead, is loaded with nothing
more deadly than a blood-clot. Werther renders himself
ridiculous, continues to live, marries Charlotte, in short,
ends even more tragically than in Goethe's original.

" The Universal German Library " was the name of the
journal founded by Nicolai, wherein he and his friends
did battle with superstition, the Jesuits, the court lackeys,
&c. It cannot be denied that many a blow aimed at
superstition unfortunately fell on poetry. It was thus,
for example, that Nicolai made war on the nascent en-
thusiasm for old German popular poetry, and in the main
here again he was right ; for these songs, with all possible
excellences, contained many reminiscences that were
unseasonable ; these old strains, the ranz des vaches of the
Middle Ages, had power to entice back the sensibilities of
people to the cowsheds of the past. Like Ulysses, he
tried to stop the ears of his companions that they might
not hear the song of the Syrens, heedless whether hence-
forth they remained deaf also to the innocent warbling of
the nightingale. In order radically to clear the soil of
the present from old weeds, this practical man concerned
himself little whether with the weeds he also uprooted
the flowers. But the party of the flowers and the night-
ingales, with all that belonged to that party, beauty, grace,
wit, and pleasantry, indignantly rose up against him, and
poor Nicolai had to succumb.

In our day circumstances in Germany are changed, and

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 93

the party of the flowers and the nightingales is intimately
allied with the revolution. The future belongs to us, and
already the rosy morn of victory begins to dawn. If ever
this beautiful day should shed its light over the whole
Fatherland, then shall we call to mind the dead ; we shall
think of thee too, old Nicolai, poor martyr of reason ! We
shall bear thy ashes to the German pantheon in the midst
of a triumphant procession accompanied by a choir of
music, and amongst the wind instruments shall certainly
be no shrill fife ; we shall lay upon thy bier a befitting
crown of laurel, and as we perform this act we shall do
our utmost not to smile.

As it is my desire to give an idea of the philosophic and
religious condition of those times, I must here refer to the
thinkers who laboured at Berlin in more or less intimate
association with Nicolai, and who occupied a sort of mean
between philosophy and polite literature. They had no
special system, only a special tendency. They resembled
the English moralists as to their style and in their first
principles. They wrote without observing strict scientific
form ; and moral consciousness was the sole origin of their
knowledge. Their tendency is precisely that which we
find in the French philanthropists. In religion they are
rationalists, in politics cosmopolitans ; in morals they are
men, noble and virtuous men, severe towards themselves,
indulgent towards others. In respect of talent, Mendels-
sohn, Sulzer, Abt, Moritz, Garve, Engel, and Biester may
be named as the most distinguished amongst them. I
have a peculiar liking for Moritz ; he did good service in
experimental psychology; his artlessness was charming,
though but little appreciated by his friends ; his memoirs
form one of the most remarkable landmarks of the time.
Mendelssohn,* however, has a social significance far be-

* For what is by far the best cessible to English readers, we are
account of Moses Mendelssohn ac- indebted to " German Life and Lite-

94 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

yond all the others. He was the reformer of the German
Israelites, his co-religionists ; he destroyed the authority
of the Talmud; he founded pure Mosai'sm. This man,
whom his contemporaries called the German Socrates, and
whom they so reverently admired for his nobility of soul
and force of intellect, was the son of a poor sacristan of
the synagogue at Dessau. In addition to this misfortune
of birth, Providence sent him into the world hunchbacked,
as if to teach the rabble in a striking manner that men are
to be judged, not by their external appearance, but by
their intrinsic worth. Or, did Providence allot him a
hunchback in order that he might ascribe many an
insult of the rabble to a misfortune for which a wise
man readily consoles himself ?

As Luther had overthrown the Papacy, so Mendelssohn
overthrew the Talmud; and he did so after the same
fashion, namely, by rejecting tradition, by declaring the
Bible to be the source of religion, and by translating the
most important part of it. By these means he shattered
Judaic, as Luther had shattered Christian, Catholicism;
for the Talmud is, in fact, the Catholicism of the Jews.
It is a Gothic cathedral, overladen no doubt with childish
and superfluous ornament, yet awakening our astonish-
ment by its heaven- aspiring, gigantic proportions. It
is a hierarchy of religious laws, often relating to the
most fanciful and ridiculous subtilties, but so ingeniously
superimposed and subordinated, each part sustaining and
supporting another, and so terribly consistent as to form
an awe-inspiring, colossal whole.

Christian Catholicism once overthrown, the Catholicism

rature in a Series of Biographical besides accurate biography, con-
Studies," by Alexander Hay Japp, tains much sound criticism, and the
LL.D. Marshall, Japp, & Co., Lnn- author's enthusiasm for his subject
don. No better introduction to the never betrays him into mere hero-
study of modern German literature worship. TE.
could be desired. Dr. Japp's book,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 95

of the Jews, the Talmud, must also succumb: for the
Talmud had henceforth lost its significance; it served
merely as a bulwark against Eome, and it enabled the
Jews to offer as heroic a resistance to Christian Eome
as formerly they had offered to Pagan Eome. And they
have not only resisted ; they have been victorious. The
poor Eabbi of Nazareth over whose dying head the Pagan
Eoman inscribed the scoffing words, " King of the Jews,"
even this King of the Jews in mockery, thorn-crowned
and clad in ironical purple, became at last the God of
the Eomans, and before him they had to bend the knee !
As heathen Eome had been, so Christian Eome was van-
quished and has even become tributary. If you have a
mind, dear reader, to betake yourself on one of the first days
of the quarter to the Eue Laffitte, No. 15, you will there
see a lumbering carriage draw up before the high door-
way, and from it steps down a stout man. He mounts a
staircase leading to a small room in which is seated a
younger fair-haired man, though he is really older than
he looks a man with the distinguished, negligent air of
a grand seigneur, underlying which, however, there is
something so solid, so positive, so absolute, that he might
be thought to have all the world's wealth in his pocket.
And truly he has all the world's wealth in his pocket,
for his name is Mr. James Eothschild, and the stout man
is Monsignor Grimbaldi, legate of his holiness the Pope,
in whose name he brings the interest on the Eoman loan,
the tribute of Eome.

Of what use, now, the Talmud ?

Moses Mendelssohn, then, deserves the highest praise
for having destroyed in Germany, at any rate, Jewish
Catholicism ; for what is superfluous is injurious. But in
rejecting tradition he endeavoured to maintain as a reli-
gious duty the Mosaic ceremonial law. Was this timidity
or was it prudence ? Was it the sorrowful constraint of

96 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

lingering affection that forbade his laying destructive
hands on objects that had been the most sacred in the
eyes of his forefathers, and for which so much blood and
so many martyr tears had flowed ? I do not believe it.
Like the sovereigns of material kingdoms, the sovereigns
of the spirit must harden their hearts against family affec-
tions; and on the throne of thought men dare not give
way to tender sensibilities. I am much rather of opinion
therefore that Moses Mendelssohn saw in pure Mosaism
an institution that might serve as a last intrenchment of
deism; for deism was his inmost faith, his most profound
conviction. When his friend Lessing died and was
accused of Spinozism, he defended him with the most
anxious zeal, and fretted himself to death over the accu-
sation.

I have already, for the second time, mentioned a name
that no German can pronounce without waking in his
bosom an echo more or less loud. Since Luther, Germany
has produced no greater, no better man than Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing. These two men are our pride and our
joy. Amidst the gloom of this present time we look
upwards towards these consoling figures, and they beckon
to us with signs of glorious promise. Yea, the third man
will also come, who will complete what Luther began,
what Lessing carried forward, and of whom the German
Fatherland has such dire need, the third emancipator!
I see already the gleam of his golden armour shining
through his imperial purple mantle, like the sun through
the ruddy dawn !

Like Luther's, Lessing's work consisted not merely in
positive achievement, but in rousing to its very depths
the German nation, and in giving a beneficial impulse
to intellectual movement by his criticism and by his
polemic. Lesaing was the living criticism of his time,
and his whole life was a polemic. His criticism made

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 97

itself felt throughout the whole range of thought and of
feeling in religion, in science, in art ; his polemic over-
came every adversary and waxed stronger with every
victory. As he himself avowed, conflict was necessary to
his mental development. He resembled the legendary
Norman, who inherited the talents, the skill, and the vigour
of the enemies slain by him in combat, and thus at last
became endowed with every possible advantage and excel-
lence. We may well suppose that such an unwearied
champion caused no small stir in Germany, in that tran-
quil Germany where, in those days, an even greater Sabbath
stillness reigned than in our time. The majority were
struck dumb by such literary daring. But his hardihood
stood Lessing in good stead ; for to dare is the secret of
success in literature as well as in revolution and in
love. Lessing's sword inspired terror in every breast ; no
head was secure from its strokes. Yea, he struck off many
a skull out of pure wantonness, and then was malicious
enough to pick it up again and to show the public that it
was quite empty. Him whom he could not reach with
the sword of his logic he slew with the arrows of his wit.
Friends admired the gay feathers with which his arrows
were winged ; enemies felt their points rankling in their
breasts. Lessing's wit had nothing in common with that
playfulness, that gaiety, those bounding sallies that French-
men so well know. His wit was no little French spaniel
chasing its own shadow ; it was more like a great German
tomcat playing with a mouse before strangling it.

Polemic was truly Lessing's delight, and therefore he
never considered very attentively whether his opponent
was worthy of him. Thus it comes that by his polemic
many a name has been snatched from well-merited obli-
vion. He has enveloped with the most upiritual irony,
with the most delicious humour, not a few paltry scribblers,
who are preserved for all future time in Lessing's works,

98 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

like insects embedded in a piece of amber. In the act of
putting his adversaries to death he has bestowed on them
immortality. Who amongst us would ever have heard
anything of that Klotz on whom Lessing lavished so much
derision and acumen ? The granite blocks that he hurled
down upon this miserable antiquary, and with which he
crushed him to atoms, form an indestructible monument
to the object of his satire.

It is remarkable that this man, the most redoubtable
wit in Germany, was also our most honest man. There is
nothing comparable to his love of truth. He would not
grant the slightest concession to a lie, even though by
doing so, after the manner of the wise men of the world,
he might promote the triumph of truth. He dared do
everything for the truth except lie. Whoever, he once
said, supposes that he may bring truth to market under
all sorts of artifices and disguises, may indeed be the
pander, but he has never been the lover, of truth.

The admirable saying of Buffon, " The style is the man
himself," finds in Lessing its best exemplification. His
manner of writing is, like his character, truthful, firm,
without ornament, beautiful and imposing by reason of
inherent strength. His style is altogether like that of
Eoman architecture ; it combines the greatest solidity with
greatest simplicity ; the sentences rest one upon another
like blocks of square-hewn masonry. As for the latter the
law of gravity, so in Lessing's writings logical sequence,
is the invisible binding power. In his prose, therefore,
there are but few of those redundancies and artificial
turns of expression which we employ as mortar in the
construction of our periods. Still less do we find in it
any of those caryatides of thought which you French call
la belle phrase.

That such a man as Lessing could never be happy you will
readily understand. Even though he had not loved truth,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 99

though he had not obstinately defended it on all occasions,
iie would still have been unhappy, for he was a genius.
Men will forgive you everything, said a poet lately, with
a sigh: they will forgive you wealth, they will forgive
you noble birth, they will forgive you a handsome form,
they will even admit that you are talented ; but they are
inexorable in their enmity towards genius. And alas !
even though it encounter no malignant enemy from with-
out, genius will be sure to find within itself an enemy
ready to bring calamity upon it. This is why the history
of great men is always a martyrology ; when they are not
sufferers for the great human race, they suffer for their own
greatness, for the grand manner of their being, for their
hatred of philistinism, for the discomfort they feel amidst
the pretentious commonplaces, the mean trivialities of their
surroundings a discomfort that readily leads them to
extravagances, to the playhouse, for example, or even to
the gambling-house, as happened to poor Lessing.

But evil rumour could find no other reproach to lay to
his charge than this, and all we learn from his biography
on the subject is, that pretty actresses seemed to him more
amusing than Hamburg clergymen, and that mute cards
afforded him better entertainment than the prating of
Wolfian philosophers.

It is heartrending to read in his biography how fate
denied this man every source of joy, and would not even
permit him to find solace in the peace of family life at the
close of his daily conflicts. Once only did fortune appear
desirous of smiling on him by bestowing on him a beloved
wife and a child. Yet this joy was but as the sunbeam
that gilds the wing of a bird in passing flight. Even as
quickly did it disappear. His wife died from the effects
of her confinement, and his child immediately after its
birth. Of his child he wrote to a friend those words of
bitter irony :

ioo RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

" My joy was but brief, and I lost him with such regret,
this son ! For he showed so much intelligence so much
intelligence ! Do not suppose that my few hours of
paternity had already made me an ape of a father. I
know what I say. Did it not show intelligence on his
part that they had to bring him into the world by means
of iron forceps, and that he so quickly perceived what
a troublous world it is? Was it not intelligence that
caused him to seize the first opportunity of making his
escape out of it again ? I too wanted for once to be as
highly favoured as other men; but I have come badly
out of it."

There was one misfortune about which Lessing never
spoke to his friends : this was his terrible isolation, his
intellectual solitariness. A few of his contemporaries
loved him ; none understood him. Mendelssohn, his
dearest friend, defended him with zeal against the charge
of Spinozisrn. Defence and zeal were as ridiculous as
they were superfluous. Eest in peace in thy grave, old
Moses! Thy Lessing was indeed on the highroad to-
wards that dreadful heresy, that pitiful misfortune called
Spinozism ; but the Almighty, the Father in heaven, saved
him through death at the right moment. Eest in peace !
thy Lessing was no Spinozist, as calumny asserted; he
died a good deist, like thyself, and Nicolai, and Teller,
and " The Universal German Library " !

Lessing was but the prophet pointing out the way from
the second to the third Testament. I have called him the
continuator of Luther, and it is specially in this relation
that I have now to speak of him. Of his importance as
influencing German art I shall afterwards deal. In art,
not merely by his criticism but also by his example, he
effected a wholesome reform, and this side of his activity
is the one usually illustrated and brought into prominence.
We, however, regard him from another standpoint, and his

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 101

philosophical and theological contests are of more import-
ance to us than his dramaturgy and his dramas. Yet the
latter, like all his writings, have a social significance, and
" Nathan the Wise " is in reality not only a good comedy
but also a philosophico-theological treatise in favour of
pure deism. Art was for Lessing also a tribune, and when
thrust from the pulpit or driven from the philosopher's
chair, he sprang upon the boards of the theatre and spoke
there in still plainer language, and gained a still more
numerous audience.

I say that Lessing continued the wo*k of Luther. After
Luther had emancipated us from the power of tradition
and set up the Bible as the only source of Christianity,
there arose a frigid literalism, and the letter of the Bible
became as great a tyranny as tradition had formerly been.
From this tyranny of the letter Lessing was our great
liberator. As Luther was certainly not alone in the
combat with tradition, so Lessing was not indeed the only,
though by far the most valiant, combatant of the letter.
It is in this conflict that his battle-cry resounds most
loudly; it is here that he wields his sword with most
vigorous delight, and it is a sword that flashes and slays.
But it is here also that he is most sorely beset by the
black phalanx, and in the midst of such straits he once
cried out :

" sancta simplicitas ! But I have not yet come to the
place where the good man who thus exclaimed could utter
only this exclamation. (These were the words pronounced
at the stake by John Huss.) We must first be heard ; we
must first be judged by those who can and will hear and
judge us.

" Oh, that he might do so, he whom I would most gladly
have as my judge ! Luther ! thou great misunderstood
man ! and misunderstood by none more than by those ob-
stinate ones who, with thy shoes in their hand, clamorous

102 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

but indifferent, go jogging along the road thou hast opened
for them ! Thou hast redeemed us from the bondage of
tradition : who shall redeem us from the more intolerable
bondage of the letter ? Who shall at length bring to us a
Christianity such as thou wouldst teach to-day, such as
Christ himself would teach ? "

Yes, the letter, said Lessing, is the last husk that en-
velops Christianity, and only after its destruction will
the spirit of Christianity stand revealed. This spirit,
however, is nothing else than what the philosophy of
Wolf undertook to demonstrate, what philanthropists
feel in their hearts, what Mendelssohn found in Mosaism,
what Freemasons have chanted, what poets have sung,
what was in Lessing's day making itself felt under every
variety of form throughout Germany pure Deism.

Lessing died at Brunswick in 1781, misunderstood,
hated, and decried. In the same year appeared at Konigs-
berg Immanuel Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason." With
this book (which through a singular delay did not become
generally known till the close of the decade) there begins
in Germany an intellectual revolution which offers the
most striking analogies to the material revolution in
France, and which must to the deeper thinkers appear of at
least as great importance as the latter. It developed itself
in the same phases, and between both revolutions there
exists the most remarkable parallelism. On each side of
the Rhine we see the same breach with the past; all
respect for tradition is withdrawn. As here, in France,
every privilege, so there, in Germany, every thought, must
justify itself ; as here, the monarchy, the keystone of the
old social edifice, so there, deism, the keystone of the old
intellectual rfyime, falls from its place.

Of this catastrophe, the 2ist of January,* for deism,
we shall speak in the concluding part of this volume.
* Louis XVI. was beheaded on the 2 1 st of January 1793. Tiu

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 103

A peculiar awe, a mysterious piety, forbids our writing
more to-day. Our heart is full of shuddering compassion :
it is the old Jehovah himself that is preparing for death.
"We have known him so well from his cradle in Egypt, where
he was reared among the divine calves and crocodiles,
the sacred onions, ibises, and cats. We have seen him bid
farewell to these companions of his childhood and to the
obelisks and sphinxes of his native Ni]e, to become in
Palestine a little god-king amidst a poor shepherd people,
and to inhabit a temple-palace of his own. We have
seen him later coming into contact with Assyrian-Baby-
lonian civilisation, renouncing his all-too-human passions,
no longer giving vent to fierce wrath and vengeance, at
least no longer thundering at every trifle. We have seen
him migrate to Eome, the capital, where he abjures all
national prejudices and proclaims the celestial equality of
all nations, and with such fine phrases establishes an op-
position to the old Jupiter, and intrigues ceaselessly till he
attains supreme authority, and from the Capitol rules the
city and the world, urbem et orbem. We have seen how,
growing still more spiritualised, he becomes a loving father,
a universal friend of man, a benefactor of the world, a
philanthropist ; but all tins could avail him nothing !

Hear ye not the bells resounding ? Kneel down. They
are bringing the sacraments to a dying god !

PART THIRD.

IT is related that an English mechanician, who had already
invented the most ingenious machines, at last took it into
his head to construct a man ; and that he succeeded. The
work of his hands deported itself and acted quite like a
human being ; it even contained within its leathern breast
a sort of apparatus of human sentiment, differing not
greatly from the habitual sentiments of Englishmen ; it
could communicate its emotions by articulate sounds, and
the noise of wheels in its interior, of springs and escape-
ments, which was distinctly audible, reproduced the genuine
English pronunciation. This automaton, in short, was an
accomplished gentleman, and nothing was wanting to render
it completely human except a soul. But the English mecha-
nician had not the power to bestow on his work this soul,
and the poor creature, having become conscious of its
imperfection, tormented its creator day and night with
supplication for a soul. This request, daily repeated with
growing urgency, became at last so insupportable to the
poor artist that he took to flight in order to escape from
his own masterpiece. But the automaton also took the
mail coach, pursued him over the whole continent, travelled
incessantly at his heels, frequently overtook him, and then
gnashed and growled in his ears, Give me a sold ! These
two figures may now be met with in every country, and he
only who knows their peculiar relationship to each other
can comprehend their unwonted haste and their haggard

io6 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

anxiety. But as soon as we are made aware of their strange
relationship, we at once discover in them something of a
general character ; we see how one portion of the English
people is becoming weary of its mechanical existence, and
is demanding a soul, whilst the other portion, tormented
by such a request, is driven about in all directions, and
that neither of them can endure matters at home any
longer.

The story is a terrible one. It is a fearful thing when
the bodies we have created demand of us a soul ; but it is
a far more dreadful, more terrible, more awful thing when
we have created a soul, to hear that soul demanding of us
a body, and to behold it pursuing us with this demand.
The thought to which we have given birth is such a soul,
and it leaves us no rest until we have endowed it with a
body, until we have given it sensible reality. Thought
strives to become action, the word to become flesh, and,
marvellous to relate, man, like God in the Bible, needs
only to express his thought and the world takes form ;
there is light or darkness; the waters separate themselves
from the dry land ; or it may even be that wild beasts
are brought forth. The world is the sign-manual of the
word.

Mark this, ye proud men of action : ye are nothing but
unconscious hodmen of the men of thought who, often in
humblest stillness, have appointed you your inevitable task.
Maximilian Eobespierre was merely the hand of Jeau
Jacques Eousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the
womb of time the body whose soul Eousseau had created.
May not the restless anxiety that troubled the life of Jean
Jacques have caused such stirrings within him that he
already foreboded the kind of accoucheur that was needed
to bring his thought living into the world ? *

Old Fontenelle may have been right when he said : " If

* This paragraph is wanting in the French version. TR.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 107

I held all the truths of the universe in my hand, I
would be very careful not to open it." I, for my part,
think otherwise. If I held all the truths of the world in
my hand, I might perhaps beseech you instantly to cut
off that hand ; but, in any case, I should not long hold it
closed. I was not born to be a gaoler of thoughts; by
Heaven! I would set them free. What though they were to
incarnate themselves in the most hazardous realities, what
though they were to range through all lands like a mad
bacchanalian procession, what though they were to crush
with their thyrsus our most innocent flowers, what though
they were to invade our hospitals and chase from his bed
the old sick world my heart would bleed, no doubt, and I
myself would suffer hurt thereby ! For alas ! I too am part
of this old sick world, and the poet says truly, one may
mock at his crutches yet not be able to walk any better
for that. I am the most grievously sick of you all, and
am the more to be pitied since I know what health is ; but
you do not know it, you whom I envy ; you are capable of
dying without perceiving your dying condition. Yea, many
of you are already long since dead, though maintaining that
your real life is just beginning. When I try to dispel
such a delusion, then you are angry with me and rail at
me, and, more horrible still, the dead rush upon and mock
at me, and more loathsome to me than their insults is
the smell of their putrefaction. Hence, ye spectres ! I
am about to speak of a man whose mere name has the
might of an exorcism; I speak of Immanuel Kant.

It is said that night-wandering spirits are filled with
terror at sight of the headsman's axe. With what mighty
fear, then, must they be stricken when there is held up
to them Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason " ! This is the
sword that slew deism in Germany.

To speak frankly, you French have been tame and
moderate compared with us Germans. At most, you could

io8 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

but kill a king, and he had already lost his head before
you guillotined him. For accompaniment to such deed
you must needs cause such a drumming and shrieking
and stamping of feet that the whole universe trembled.
To compare Maximilian Eobespierre with Immanuel Kant
is to confer too high an honour upon the former. Maxi-
milian Robespierre, the great citizen of the Eue Saint
Honore, had, it is true, his sudden attacks of destructive-
ness when it was a question of the monarchy, and his
frame was violently convulsed when the fit of regicidal
epilepsy was on ; but as soon as it came to be a question
about the Supreme Being, he wiped the white froth from
his lips, washed the blood from his hands, donned his blue
Sunday coat with silver buttons, and stuck a nosegay in
the bosom of his broad vest.

The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to por-
tray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mecha-
nical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little
retired street of Konigsberg, an old town on the north-
eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the
great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passion-
less and methodical manner its daily routine than did
its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning,
coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking,
everything had its appointed time, and the neighbours
knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when
Immanuel Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey,
tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and
betook himself to the little linden avenue called after
him to this day the " Philosopher's Walk." Summer and
winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when
the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain,
the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudg-
ing anxiously behind him with a big umbrella under his
arm, like an image of Providence.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 109

What a strange contrast did this man's outward life
present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts!
In sooth, had the citizens of Konigsberg had the least
presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they
would have felt a far more awful dread at the presence of
this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but
kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing
more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed
at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly
manner and set their watches by him.

But though Immanuel Kant, the arch-destroyer in the
realm of thought, far surpassed in terrorism Maximilian
Robespierre, he had many similarities with the latter,
which induce a comparison between the two men. In
the first place, we find in both the same inexorable, keen,
poesyless, sober integrity. We likewise find in both the
same talent of suspicion, only that in the one it mani-
fested itself in the direction of thought and was called
criticism, whilst in the other it was directed against man-
kind and was styled republicau virtue. But both pre-
sented in the highest degree the type of the narrow-minded
citizen. Nature had destined them for weighing out
coffee and sugar, but fate decided that they should weigh
out other things, and into the scales of the one it laid a
king, into the scales of the other a God. . . . And they
both gave the correct weight !

The " Critique of Pure Eeason " is Kant's principal
work ; and as none of his other writings is of equal im-
portance, in speaking of it we must give it the right of
preference. This book appeared in 1781, but, as already
said, did not become generally known till 1789. At the
time of its publication it was quite overlooked, except for
two insignificant notices, and it was not till a later period
that public attention was directed to this great book by
the articles of Schiitz, Schultz, and Eeinhold. The cause

no RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

of this tardy recognition undoubtedly lay in the unusual
form and bad style in which the work is written. As
regards his style, Kant merits severer censure than any
other philosopher, more especially when we compare this
with his former and better manner of writing. The
recently published collection of his minor works contains
his first attempts, and we are surprised to find in these an
excellent and often very witty style. These little treatises
were trilled forth while their author ruminated over his
great work. There is a gleefulness about them like that
of a soldier tranquilly arming for a combat in which he
promises himself certain victory. Especially remarkable
amongst them are his " Universal Natural History and
Theory of the Heavens," composed as early as 1755 ; " Ob-
servations on the Emotions of the Sublime and Beautiful,"
written ten years later; and " Dreams of a Ghostseer," full
of admirable humour after the manner of the French
essay. Kant's wit as displayed in these pamphlets is of
quite a peculiar sort. The wit clings to the thought, and
in spite of its tenuity is thus enabled to reach a satis-
factory height. Without such support wit, be it ever so
robust, cannot be successful; like a vine- tendril wanting
a prop, it can only creep along the ground to rot there
with all its most precious fruits.

But why did Kant write his " Critique of Pure Reason "
in such a colourless, dry, packing-paper style ? I fancy
that, having rejected the mathematical form of the Cartesio-
Leibnitzo-Wolfian school, he feared that science might lose
something of its dignity by expressing itself in light,
attractive, and agreeable tones. He therefore gave it a
stiff, abstract form, which coldly repelled all familiarity
on the part of intellects of the lower order. He wished
haughtily to separate himself from the popular philosophers
of his time, who aimed at the most citizen-like clearness,
and so clothed his thoughts in a courtly and frigid official

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY, in

dialect. Herein he shows himself a true philistine. But
it might also be that Kant needed for the carefully
measured march of his ideas a language similarly precise,
and that he was not in a position to create a better. It is
only genius that has a new word for a new thought.
Immanuel Kant, however, was no genius. Conscious of
this defect, Kant, like the worthy Maximilian, showed
himself all the more mistrustful of genius, and went so
far as to maintain, in his " Critique of the Faculty of
Judgment/' that genius has no business with scientific
thought, and that its action ought to be relegated to the
domain of art.

The heavy, buckram style of Kant's chief work has
been the source of much mischief ; for brainless imitators
aped him in his external form, and hence arose amongst
us the superstition that no one can be a philosopher who
writes well. The mathematical form, however, could not,
after the days of Kant, reappear in philosophy ; he has
mercilessly passed sentence of death upon it in his
"Critique of Pure Beason." The mathematical form in
philosophy, he says, is good for nothing save the building
of houses of cards, in the same way that the philosophic
form in mathematics produces nothing but twaddle, for
in philosophy there can be no definitions such as those
in mathematics, where the definitions are not discursive
but intuitive, that is to say, capable of being demon-
strated by inspection ; whilst what are called definitions
in philosophy are only tentatively, hypothetically put
forth, the real definition appearing only at the close, as
result.

How comes it. that philosophers display so strong a
predilection for the mathematical form ? This predilec-
tion dates from the time of Pythagoras, who designated
the principles of things by numbers. This was the idea
of a genius : all that is sensible and finite is stripped off

H2 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

in a number, and yet it denotes something determined,
and the relation of this thing to another determined
thing, which last, designated in turn by a number, re-
ceives the same insensible and infinite character. In this
respect numbers resemble ideas that preserve the same
character and relation to one another. We can indicate
by numbers in a very striking manner ideas, as they are
produced in our mind and in nature ; but the number still
remains the sign of the idea, it is not the idea itself.
The master is always conscious of this distinction, but the
scholar forgets it, and transmits to other scholars at second
hand merely a numerical hieroglyph, dead ciphers, which
are repeated with parrot-like scholastic pride, but of which
the living significance is lost. This applies likewise to
the other methods of mathematical demonstration. The
intellect in its eternal mobility suffers no arrest; and
just as little can it be fixed down by lines, triangles,
squares, and circles, as by numbers. Thought can neither
be calculated nor measured.

As my chief duty is to facilitate in France the study
of German philosophy, I always dwell most strongly on
the external difficulties that are apt to dismay a stranger
who has not already been made aware of them. I would
draw the special attention of those who desire to make
Frenchmen acquainted with Kant to the fact, that it is
possible to abstract from his philosophy that portion
which serves merely to refute the absurdities of the
Wolfian philosophy. This polemic, constantly reappear-
ing, will only tend to produce confusion in the minds of
Frenchmen, and can be of no utility to them.

The "Critique of Pure Eeason " is, as I have said,
Kant's principal work, and his other writings are in a
measure superfluous, or may at least be considered as
commentaries. The social importance that attaches to
his chief work will be apparent from what follows.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 113

The philosophers who preceded Kant reflected, doubt-
less, on the origin of our cognitions, and followed, as we
have seen, two different routes, according to their view
of ideas as a priori or as a posteriori ; but concerning the
faculty of knowing, concerning the extent and limits of
this faculty, they occupied themselves less. Now this
was the task that Kant set before himself ; he submitted
the faculty of knowing to a merciless investigation, he
sounded all the depths of this faculty, he ascertained all
its limits. In this investigation he certainly discovered
that about many things, wherewith formerly we supposed
ourselves to be most intimately acquainted, we can know
nothing. This was very mortifying; but it has always
been useful to know of what things we can know nothing.
He who warns us against a useless journey performs as great
a service for us as he who points out to us the true path.
Kant proves to us that we know nothing about things
as they are in and by themselves, but that we have a
knowledge of them only in so far as they are reflected in
our minds. We are therefore just like the prisoners of
whose condition Plato draws such an afflicting picture
in the seventh book of his Republic. These wretched
beings, chained neck and thigh in such a manner that
they cannot turn their heads about, are seated within a
roofless prison, into which there comes from above a
certain amount of light. This light, however, is the light
from a fire, the flame of which rises up behind them, and
indeed is separated from them only by a little wall.
Along the outer side of this wall are walking men bearing
all sorts of statues, images in wood and stone, and con-
versing with one another. Now the poor prisoners can
see nothing of these men, who are not tall enough to
overtop the wall ; and of the statues, which rise above the
wall, they see only the shadows flitting along the side of
the wall opposite them. The shadows, however, they take

114 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

for real objects, and, deceived by the echo of their prison,
believe that it is the shadows that are conversing.

With the appearance of Kant former systems of philo-
sophy, which had merely sniffed about the external aspect
of things, assembling and classifying their characteristics,
ceased to exist. Kant led investigation back to the human
intellect, and inquired what the latter had to reveal. Not
without reason, therefore, did he compare his philosophy
to the method of Copernicus. Formerly, when men con-
ceived the world as standing still, and the sun as revolv-
ing round it, astronomical calculations failed to agree
accurately. But when Copernicus made the sun stand
still and the earth revolve round it, behold ! everything
accorded admirably. So formerly reason, like the sun,
moved round the universe of phenomena, and sought to
throw light upon it. But Kant bade reason, the sun,
stand still, and the universe of phenomena now turns
round, and is illuminated the moment it comes within the
region of the intellectual orb.

These few words regarding the task that presented itself
to Kant will suffice to show that I consider that section of
his book wherein he treats of phenomena and noumena as
the most important part, as the central point, of his philo-
sophy. Kant, in effect, distinguishes between the appear-
ances of things and things themselves. As we can know
nothing of objects except in so far as they manifest them-
selves to us through their appearance, and as objects do
not exhibit themselves to us as they are in and by them-
selves, Kant gives the name phenomena to objects as
they appear to us, and noumena to objects as they are in
themselves. We know things, therefore, only as pheno-
mena ; we cannot know them as noumena. The latter are
purely problematic ; we can neither say that they exist
nor that they do not exist. The word noumena has been
correlated with the word phenomena merely to enable us

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 115

to speak of things in so far as they are cognisable by us,
without occupying our judgment about things that are not
cognisable by us. Kant did not therefore, as do many
teachers whom I will not name, make a distinction of
objects into phenomena and noumena, into things that for
us exist and into things that for us do not exist. This
would be an Irish bull in philosophy. He wished merely
to express a notion of limitation.

God, according to Kant, is a nournen. As a result of
his argument, this ideal and transcendental being, hitherto
called God, is a mere fiction.* It has arisen from a
natural illusion. Kant shows that we can know nothing
regarding this noumen, regarding God, and that all reason-
able proof of his existence is impossible. The words of
Dante, " Leave all hope behind ! " may be inscribed over
this portion of the " Critique of Pure Reason."

My readers will, I think, gladly exempt me from at-
tempting a popular elucidation of that portion of his work
in which Kant treats " of the arguments of speculative
reason in favour of the existence of a Supreme Being."
Although the formal refutation of these arguments occu-
pies but a small space, and is not taken in hand till the
second part of the book is reached, there is already a very
evident intention of leading up to this refutation, which
forms one of the main points of the work. It connects
itself with the "Critique of all Speculative Theology,"
wherein the last phantoms of deism are put to flight. I
cannot help remarking that Kant, in attacking the three
principal kinds of evidence in favour of the existence of
God, namely, the ontological, the cosmological, and the
physico-theological, whilst successful, according to my
opinion, in refuting the latter two, fails with regard to the
first. I am not aware whether the above terms are under-
stood in this country, and I therefore quote the passage

* In the Prench version, " is only an assumption." TB.

n6 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

from the " Critique of Pure Season " in which Kant for-
mulates the distinction between them.

" There are but three kinds of proof possible to specu-
lative reason of the existence of God. All the routes that
may be selected with this end in view start, either from
definite experience and the peculiar properties of the
external world, as revealed by experience, and ascend from
it according to the laws of causality up to the supreme
cause above the world ; or, they rest merely on an indefi-
nite experience, as, for example, on an existence or being
of some kind or other ; or, lastly, they make an abstraction
from all experience, and arrive at a conclusion entirely a
priori from pure ideas of the existence of the supreme
cause. The first of these is the physico-theological proof,
the second the cosmological, and the third the ontological.
Other proofs there are none, nor can other proofs exist."

After repeated and careful study of Kant's chief work,
I fancied myself able to recognise everywhere visible in
it his polemic against these proofs of the existence of
God ; and of this polemic I might speak at greater length
were I not restrained by a religious sentiment. The mere
discussion by any one of the existence of God causes me
to feel a strange disquietude, an uneasy dread such as I
once experienced in visiting New Bedlam in London,
when, for a moment losing sight of my guide, I was sur-
rounded by madmen. " God is all that is," and doubt of
His existence is doubt of life itself, it is death.

The more blameworthy any dispute regarding the exist-
ence of God may be, the more praiseworthy is meditation
on the nature of God. Such meditation is a true worship
of God ; the soul is thereby detached from the perishable
and finite, and attains to consciousness of innate love and
of the harmony of the universe. It is this consciousness
that sends a thrill through the heart of the emotional man
in the act of prayer or in the contemplation of the sacred

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 117

symbols ; and the thinker realises this holy fervour in the
exercise of that sublime faculty of the mind called reason,
a faculty whose highest function is to inquire into the
nature of God. Men of specially religious temperament
concern themselves with this problem from childhood
upwards; they are mysteriously troubled about it even
at the first dawnings of reason.* The author of these
pages is most joyfully conscious of having possessed this
early primitive religious feeling, and it has never forsaken
him. God was always the beginning and the end of all
my thoughts. If I now inquire: What is God ? what is
his nature? as a little child I had already inquired:
How is God ? what is he like ? In that childish time I
could gaze upwards at the sky during whole days, and
was sadly vexed at evening because I never caught a
glimpse of God's most holy countenance, but saw only the
grey silly grimaces of the clouds. I was quite puzzled
over the astronomical lore with which in the " enlighten-
ment period " even the youngest children were tormented,
and there was no end to my amazement on learning that all
those thousand millions of stars were spheres as large and
as beautiful as our own earth, and that over all this glitter-
ing throng of worlds a single God ruled. I recollect once
seeing God in a dream far above in the most distant
firmament. He was looking contentedly out of a little
window in the sky, a devout hoary-headed being with a
small Jewish beard, and he was scattering forth myriads
of seed-corns, which, as they fell from heaven, burst open
in the infinitude of space, and expanded to vast dimen-
sions till they became actual, radiant, blossoming, peopled
worlds, each one as large as our own globe. I could never
forget this countenance, and often in dreams I used to
see the cheerful-looking old man sprinkling forth the

* The remainder of this paragraph, with the first two sentences of the
succeeding one, is omitted in the French version. TJU

ii8 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

world-seeds from his little window in the sky; once I
even saw him clucking like our maid when she threw
down for the hens their barley. I could only see how the
falling seed-corns expanded into great shining orbs ; but
the great hens that may by chance have been waiting
about with eager open bills to be fed with the falling orbs
I could not see.

You smile, dear reader, at the notion of the big hens.
Yet this childish notion is not so very different from the
view of the most advanced deists. In the attempt to
provide a conception of an extra-mundane God, orient
and Occident have exhausted themselves in hyperbole.
The imagination of deists has, however, vainly tormented
itself with the infinitude of time and space. It is here
that their impotence, the inadequacy of their cosmology,
and the untenableness of their explanation of the nature
of God becomes fully apparent. We are not greatly dis-
tressed, therefore, at beholding the subversion of their
explanation. Kant has actually wrought this affliction
upon them by refuting their demonstration of the exist-
ence of God.

Nor would the vindication of the ontological proof
specially benefit deism, for this proof is equally available
for pantheism. To render my meaning more intelligible,
I may remark that the ontological proof is the one em-
ployed by Descartes, and that long before his time, in the
Middle Ages, Anselm of Canterbury had expressed it in
the form of an affecting prayer. Indeed, St. Augustin
may be said to have already made use of the ontological
proof in the second book of his work, " De Libero Arbi-
trio."

I refrain, as I have said, from all popular discussion of
Kant's polemic against these proofs. Let it suffice to give
an assurance that since his time deism has vanished from
the realm of speculative reason. It may, perhaps, be

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 119

several centuries yet before this melancholy notice of
decease gets universally bruited about ; we, however, have
long since put on mourning. De Profundis !

You fancy, then, that we may now go home! By
my life, no ! there is yet a piece to be played ; after the
tragedy comes the farce. Up to this point Immanuel
Kant has pursued the path of inexorable philosophy ; he
has stormed heaven and put the whole garrison to the
edge of the sword; the ontological, cosmological, and
physico-theological bodyguards lie there lifeless ; Deity
itself, deprived of demonstration, has succumbed ; there
is now no All-mercifulness, no fatherly kindness, no other-
world reward for renunciation in this world, the immorta-
lity of the soul lies in its last agony you can hear its
groans and death-rattle ; and old Lampe is standing by
with his umbrella under his arm, an afflicted spectator of
the scene, tears and sweat-drops of terror dropping from
his countenance. Then Immanuel Kant relents and
shows that he is not merely a great philosopher but also
a good man ; he reflects, and half good-naturedly, half
ironically, he says : " Old Lampe must have a God,
otherwise the poor fellow can never be happy. Now,
man ought to be happy in this world ; practical reason
says so ; well, I am quite willing that practical reason
should also guarantee the existence of God." As the
result of this argument, Kant distinguishes between the
theoretical reason and the practical reason, and by means
of the latter, as with a magician's wand, he revivifies
deism, which theoretical reason had killed.

But is it not conceivable that Kant brought about this
resurrection, not merely for the sake of old Lampe, but
through fear of the police ? Or did he act from sincere
conviction ? Was not his object in destroying all evidence
for the existence of God to show us how embarrassing it
might be to know nothing about God ? In doing so, he

120 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

acted almost as sagely as a Westphalian friend of mine,
-who smashed all the lanterns in the Grohnder Street in
Gottingen, and then proceeded to deliver to us in the dark
a long lecture on the practical necessity of lanterns, which
he had theoretically broken in order to show how, without
them, we could see nothing.

I have already said that on its appearance the " Critique
of Pure Eeason " did not cause the slightest sensation, and it
was not till several years later, after certain clear-sighted
philosophers had written elucidations of it, that public
attention was aroused regarding the book. In the year
1789, however, nothing else was talked of in Germany but
the philosophy of Kant, about which were poured forth in
abundance commentaries, chrestomathies, interpretations,
estimates, apologies, and so forth. We need only glance
through the first philosophic catalogue at hand, and the
innumerable works having reference to Kant will amply
testify to the intellectual movement that originated with
this single man. In some it exhibited itself as an ardent
enthusiasm, in others as an acrid loathing, in many as a
gaping curiosity regarding the result of this intellectual
revolution. We had popular riots in the world of thought>
just as you had in the material world, and over the demoli-
tion of ancient dogmatism we grew as excited as you did
at the storming of the Bastille. There was also but a
handful of old pensioners left for the defence of dogmatism,
that is, the philosophy of Wolf. It was a revolution, and
one not wanting in horrors. Amongst the party of the
past, the really good Christians showed least indignation
at these horrors. Yea, they desired even greater, in order
that the measure of iniquity might be full, and the
counter-revolution be more speedily accomplished as a
necessary reaction. We had pessimists in philosophy as
you had in politics. As in France there were people who
maintained that Robespierre was the agent of Pitt, with us

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 121

there were many who went so far in their wilful blindness
as to persuade themselves that Kant was in secret alliance
with them, and that he had destroyed all philosophic
proofs of the existence of God merely in order to convince
the world that man can never arrive at a knowledge of
God by the help of reason, and must therefore hold to
revealed religion.

Kant brought about this great intellectual movement
less by the subject-matter of his writings than by the
critical spirit that pervaded them, a spirit that now began
to force its way into all sciences. It laid hold of all
constituted authority. Even poetry did not escape its
influence. Schiller, for example, was a strong Kantist,
and his artistic views are impregnated with the spirit of
the philosophy of Kant. By reason of its dry, abstract
character, this philosophy was eminently hurtful to polite
literature and the fine arts. Fortunately it did not inter-
fere in the art of cookery.

The German people is not easily set in motion ; but let
it be once forced into any path and it will follow it to its
termination with the most dogged perseverance. Thus we
exhibited our character in matters of religion, thus also
we now acted in philosophy. Shall we continue to
advance as consistently in politics?

Germany was drawn into the path of philosophy by
Kant, and philosophy became a national cause. A brilliant
troop of great thinkers suddenly sprang up on German
soil, as if called into being by magical art. If German
philosophy should some day find, as the French revolution
has found, its Thiers and its Mignet, its history will afford
as remarkable reading as the works of these authors.
Germans will study it with pride, and Frenchmen with
admiration.

Among the followers of Kant, John Gottlieb Fichte
soon rose into pre-eminence.

122 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

I almost despair of being able to convey an accurate
impression of this man. In the case of Kant we had
merely a book to examine ; but here, besides the book, we
have to take account of the man. In this man thought
and purpose are one, and in this splendid unity they affect
the contemporary world. We have therefore to investi-
gate not a philosophy merely, but also the type by which
that philosophy is conditioned, and in order thoroughly to
comprehend this twofold influence we should have to
pass in review the situation of this epoch. What a wide-
reaching task ! We shall, no doubt, be readily excused for
offering merely an imperfect outline.

At the outset there is the greatest difficulty in stating
explicitly the nature of Fichte's ideas. We have here to
encounter peculiar obstacles, obstacles connected not only
with the subject-matter but also with the form and
method of its presentation two things with which we
are specially desirous of making foreigners acquainted.
Let us begin, then, with the method of Fiehte. At first
he borrowed the method of Kaut, but it soon underwent a
change, resulting from the nature of the subject. Kant
had merely to produce a critique, that is to say, some-
thing negative ; whilst Fiehte had by and by to develop a
system, that is, something positive. This want of a defi-
nite system in the philosophy of Kant was the reason why
it was sometimes refused the name philosophy. As regards
Immanuel Kant himself, there was justice in this ; but
not as regards the Kantists, who constructed from Kant's
propositions quite a sufficient number of definite systems.
In his earlier writings, Fiehte remained, as I have said,
quite faithful to the method of his master, so much so
that his first treatise, which was published anonymously,
was attributed to Kant. But when Fiehte afterwards
produced a system he was seized with an ardent and per-
sistent passion for construction, and after constructing the

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 123

universe he sets about demonstrating, in all its aspects,
with the same ardour and persistency, that which he has
constructed. Whether constructing or demonstrating,
Fichte manifests, so to speak, an abstract passion. As in
his system, so, soon afterwards in his exposition, subjec-
tivity is dominant. Kant, on the other hand, stretches
out thought before him, analyses it, dissects it down to
its minutest fibrils, and his " Critique of Pure Eeason " is
a kind of anatomical theatre of the human intellect; he
himself, however, stands by, cold and insensible, like a
true surgeon.

The form of Fichte's writings resembles his method ; it
is living, but it has also all the faults of life : it is restless
and confused. That he may always remain thoroughly
animated, Fichte disdains the customary terminology of
philosophers, which seems to him a dead thing; but the
effect of this is to make him still less comprehensible.
About intelligibility in general he had quite a peculiar
caprice. As long as Reinhold was of the same opinion
with him, Fichte declared that no one understood him
better than Reinhold. But when the latter differed from
him in opinion, Fichte declared that he had never been
understood by him. When he himself took a different
view from Kant, he had it put in print that Kant did not
understand himself. I am here touching upon the comical
aspect of our philosophers, who are perpetually lamenting
that they are misunderstood. When Hegel was lying on
his deathbed, he said : " Only one man has understood
me," but shortly afterwards he added fretfully : " And
even he did not understand me."

Considered as to its substance, its intrinsic value, the
philosophy of Fichte is of no great significance. It has
afforded society no result. Only in so far as it exhibits
above all other systems one of the most remarkable phases
of German philosophy, only in so far as it attests the

124 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

sterility of idealism in its last consequences, and only in
so far as it forms the necessary transition to the philosophy
of our day, does the substance of Fichte's doctrine possess
a certain interest. This doctrine, being then of more im-
portance in an historical and scientific than in a social
aspect, I shall merely indicate it in a few words.

The question proposed by Fichte is, What grounds have
we for assuming that our conceptions of objects correspond
with objects external to us ? And to this question he
offers the solution: All things have reality only in our
mind.

The " Critique of Pure Eeason " was Kant's chief work,
the " Theory of Knowledge " 9 was the chief work of
Fichte. The latter book is a kind of continuation of the
former. The " Theory of Knowledge " likewise refers the
intellect back to itself. But where Kant analyses, Fichte
constructs. The " Theory of Knowledge " opens with an
abstract formula (1 = 1); it re-creates the world out of
the recesses of mind ; it fits the disjointed parts together
again ; intelligence retraces its steps over the road it had
travelled towards abstraction till it regains the world of
phenomena. Thereafter reason is enabled to declare the
phenomenal world to be a necessary operation of intelli-
gence.

The philosophy of Fichte also presents the peculiar
difficulty that it requires the mind to observe itself in the
midst of its activity; the Ego is to investigate its own
intellectual acts during the process of thinking ; thought
is to play the spy on itself whilst it thinks, whilst it grows
gradually warmer until at last it is boiling. This opera-
tion reminds us of the monkey seated on the hearth
before a copper kettle cooking its own tail ; for it is of
opinion that the true art of cookery consists not merely
in the objective act of cooking, but also in the subjective
consciousness of the process of cooking.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 125

It is a singular circumstance that the philosophy of
Fichte has always had to endure much from satire. I
once saw a caricature representing a Fichtean goose. The
poor bird has a liver so large that it no longer knows
whether it is goose or liver. On its belly is inscribed
/-/. Jean Paul has most wickedly quizzed the Fichtean
philosophy in a book entitled Clams Fichteana. That
idealism pursued to its ultimate consequences should end
by denying even the reality of matter seemed, to the great
mass of the public, to be carrying the joke too far. We
grew rather merry over the Fichtean Ego, which produced
by its mere thinking the whole external world. The
laughter of our wits was increased through a misappre-
hension that became too popular to permit of my passing
it over in silence. The great mass really supposed that
the Ego of Fichte was the Ego of Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
and that this individual Ego implied a negation of all
other existences. What an impertinence ! exclaimed the
worthy folk ; this fellow does not believe that we exist,
we who are much more corpulent than himself, and who,
as burgomasters and bailiffs, are actually his superiors !
The ladies inquired, Does he not at least believe in the
existence of his wife ? No ! And Madam Fichte suffers
this!

The Ego of Fichte, however, is not the individual but
the universal Ego, the world-Ego awakened to self-con-
sciousness. The Fichtean process of thought is not the
thinking act of an individual, of a certain person called
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ; it is rather the universal thought
manifesting itself in an individual. As we say, " It rains,"
" it lightens," and so on ; so Fichte ought not to say, " I
think," but, " it thinks," " the universal world- thought
thinks in me."

In a parallel between the French revolution and Ger-
man philosophy I once compared, more in jest than in

126 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

earnest, Fichte to Napoleon. But there are, in fact, certain
remarkable analogies between them. After the Kantists
had accomplished their work of terrorism and destruction,
Fichte appeared, as Napoleon appeared after the Conven-
tion had demolished the whole past by the help of another
sort of Critique of Pure Eeason. Napoleon and Fichte
represent the great inexorable Ego for which thought and
action are one ; and the colossal structures raised by both
men testify to a colossal will. But through the bound-
lessness of this will their structures soon fall to the
ground, and both the " Theory of Knowledge " and the
Empire crumble to pieces and disappear as quickly as they
were reared.

The Empire is now nothing more than matter of history,
but the commotion caused by the emperor in the world
has not yet calmed down, and from this commotion our
present Europe draws its vitality. It is the same with
the philosophy of Fichte ; it has completely perished, but
men's minds are still agitated by the thoughts that found
a voice in Fichte, and the after-effect of his teaching is
incalculable. Even supposing all transcendental idealism
to be an error, still the writings of Fichte are animated
by a proud independence, by a love of liberty, by a virile
dignity that have exercised, especially on the young, a
wholesome influence. The Ego of Fichte was in complete
accord with his inflexible, stubborn, stern character. The
notion of an Ego so all-powerful could perhaps germinate
only in such a character, and such a character intertwin-
ing its roots about such a doctrine could not but become
more inflexible, more stubborn, more stern.

With what aversion must this man have been regarded
by aimless sceptics, by frivolous ecclectics, and by mode-
rates of all shades ! His whole life was a combat. The
story of his youth, like that of almost all our distinguished
men, is the record of a series of afflictions. Poverty sits

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 127

by their cradle and rocks them up to manhood, and this
meagre nurse remains their faithful companion through
life.

Nothing is more touching than the sight of the proud-
willed Fichte struggling miserably through the world by
the aid of tutorship. Nor can he obtain even thus the
bitter bread of servitude in his own country, but has to
migrate to Warsaw. There the old story repeats itself ;
the tutor displeases the gracious lady of the house, or
perhaps only the ungracious lady's-maid. He cannot
scrape a leg with sufficient gentility, is not French enough,
and is no longer judged worthy to superintend the educa-
tion of a young Polish squire. Johann Gottlieb Fichte is
dismissed like a lackey, receives from his dissatisfied
master hardly the meagre expenses of his journey, leaves
Warsaw and betakes himself, full of youthful enthusiasm,
to Konigsberg, in order to make the acquaintance of Kant.
The meeting of these two men is in every respect note-
worthy. Perhaps I can present no clearer idea of their
everyday life and circumstances than by citing a frag-
ment from Fichte's journal, to be found in a biography of
him, recently published by his son.*

" On the twenty-fifth of June I set out for Konigsberg
with a carrier of this town, and arrived there, without
experiencing any remarkable incident, on the first of July.
The fourth. Visited Kant, who did not, however, receive
me with any special distinction. I attended his lecture
as an invited stranger, and again my expectation was dis-
appointed. His delivery is drowsy. Meantime I have
begun this journal.

" I have long felt a desire for a more serious interview
with Kant, but could find no means of bringing this about.
At last I hit upon the plan of writing a ' Critique of all

* " Fichte's Life and Literary Correspondence," by Immanuel Hermann
von Pichte, published in 1830-1831. TB.

128 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Revelation/ and of presenting it to him instead of a letter
of introduction. I made a beginning with it about the
thirteenth, and have since worked at it without inter-
mission. On the eighteenth of August I at last sent my
finished work to Kant, and on the twenty-fifth paid him
a visit in order to hear his opinion of it. He received me
with the most marked kindness, and appeared very well
satisfied with my dissertation. We did not come to any
close philosophical discourse. With regard to my philo-
sophical doubts, he referred me to his ' Critique of Pure
lieason,' and to the court chaplain, Schulz, whom I shall
at once find out. On the twenty-sixth I dined with
Kant in the company of Professor Sommer, and I found
Kant to be a very pleasant and very intellectual man. I
now for the first time recognised in him traits worthy of
the great intellect that has found embodiment in his
writings.

" On the twenty-seventh I brought this journal to a
close, after completing the excerpts from Kant's lectures
on anthropology, lent to me by Herr von S. I also make
a resolution henceforth regularly to continue this journal
every evening before going to ted, and to record therein
everything of interest that occurs to me, but especially
noting all characteristic traits and observations.

"The twenty-eighth; evening. Yesterday I began to
revise my Critique, and fell upon right good and profound
ideas, which, however, made me unhappily conscious that
my first treatment of the subject was exceedingly super-
ficial. To-day I was desirous of continuing the new line
of investigation, but found myself so carried away by my
imagination that I have not been able to do anything all
day. In my present position this is, unfortunately, not to
be wondered at I have calculated that, counting from
to-day, my means of subsistence will not suffice me here
for more than fourteen days. I have, it is true, already

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 129

experienced the like embarrassment, but it was in my own
country ; and, besides, with increase of years and a more
acute sense of honour, the case is always a harder one.
I have formed no resolution, nor can form any. To Pastor
Borowski, to whom Kant addressed me, I shall not reveal
my situation : if I reveal it to any one, it will be to no
other than to Kant himself.

" On the twenty-ninth I visited Borowski, in whom I
found a truly good and honourable man. He made me a
proposal of a situation, but it is not yet quite an assured
one ; and besides, it is one for which 1 have no great liking.
At the same time, by his frankness of manner he extorted
from ine the admission that it was urgent for me to obtain

an appointment. He advised me to see Professor W .

Work has been an impossibility for me. On the following

day I did in fact call on W , and afterwards visited

the court chaplain, Schulz. The prospects held out by the
former are very uncertain ; still he spoke of a tutorship
in Courland, which certainly nothing but the direst neces-
sity will induce me to accept ! Later, I went to the house
of the court chaplain, where I was at first received by
his wife. Her husband by and by appeared, but he was
absorbed in mathematical circles. Afterwards, when he
understood more distinctly who I was, Kant's recom-
mendation rendered him very friendly. He has an
angular Prussian countenance, but the very spirit of
loyalty and good-heartedness shines through its features.
I also made the acquaintance at his house of Herr Braun-
lich, and of his charge, Count Danhof, of Herr Biittner,
the court chaplain's nephew, and of a young savant of
Niirnberg, Herr Ehrhard, a youth of good and excellent
parts, though wanting in manners and without knowledge
of the world.

" On the first of September I formed a decided resolu-
tion, which I wished to communicate to Kant. A situa-

130 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

tion as tutor, however regretfully I might be obliged to
accept it, is not to be had, and the uncertainty of my
position hinders me from working with freedom of inind,
and from profiting by the instructive intercourse of my
friends. I must away, then, back to my own country!
The small loan of which I stand in need for this purpose
may perhaps be obtained through the mediation of Kant ;
but as I was in the act of going to him with the object of
declaring my intention, courage failed me. I decided to
write to him. For the evening I was invited to the house
of the court chaplain, where I spent a very pleasant
evening. On the second I finished my letter to Kant and
despatched it."

Despite the remarkableness of this letter, I cannot bring
myself to give it here. I fancy the red blood is mounting
to my cheeks, and I feel as though I were relating in the
presence of strangers the most shamefaced miseries of my
own family. In spite of my striving after French urbanity,
in spite of my philosophic cosmopolitanism, old Germany,
with all its Philistine sentiments, still holds its place in
my bosom. Enough, I cannot transcribe this letter, and
merely relate this much : Immanuel Kant was so poor
that, notwithstanding the pathetic, heart-rending tone of
this letter, he could lend Johann Gottlieb Fichte no
money. But the latter showed no trace of ill-humour On
that account, as may be gathered from the language of
his journal, from which I continue to quote :

" I was invited to dine with Kant on the third of Sep-
tember. He received me with his usual cordiality, telling
me, however, that he had not as yet formed any resolution
as to my proposition ; that he was not in a position to do
so for a fortnight. What amiable frankness! For the
rest, he started objections to my plans, which betrayed
that he was not sufficiently acquainted with our position
in Saxony. . . . During all these days I have done nothing.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 131

I will, however, set to work again, and simply leave the
rest to God. The sixth : I was asked to visit Kant, who
proposed to me the disposing of my manuscript on ' The
Critique of all Kevelation* to the publisher Hartung,
through the intervention of Pastor Borowski. ' It is well
written/ said he, when I spoke of revising it. Is this the
case ? And yet it is Kant that says so ! For the rest, he
declined the object of my first request. On the tenth I
dined with Kant. Nothing said about our affair. Master
of Arts Gensichen was there, and, though only general, the
conversation was in part very interesting. Kant's dis-
position towards me remains quite unchanged. . . . The
thirteenth : I was anxious to work to-day, and yet I get
nothing done. I am overcome by dejection. How will
this end ? How will it be with me eight days hence ?
My money will then be quite exhausted."

After much wandering about, after a long sojourn in
Switzerland, Fichte at last finds a settled position at Jena,
and from this time dates his period of splendour. Jena
and Weimar, two little Saxon towns lying within short
distance of each other, were then the central points of
the intellectual life of Germany. At Weimar were the
court and poetry ; at Jena, the university and philosophy.
There were the greatest poets, here the most learned men
of Germany. In the year 1794 Fichte commenced his
lectures at Jena. The date is significant, and explains
the spirit of his writings at this period, as well as the
tribulations to which he was henceforth exposed, and to
which four years later he succumbed. For in the year
1798 were raised those accusations of atheism that
drew down upon him insufferable persecutions, and
occasioned his departure from Jena. This, the most
noteworthy event in the life of Fichte, possesses also a
general significance, and we cannot pass it over in silence.

I 3 2 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Here, too, is naturally the place to speak of Fichte's views
concerning the nature of God.

In the periodical called The Philosophical Journal, at
that time edited by himself, Fichte published an article
entitled " Development of the Notion of Religion/' sent
to him by a certain Forberg, a schoolmaster at Saalfield.
To this article Fichte added a short explanatory disserta-
tion, under the title, " On the Ground of our Belief in a
Divine Government of the World."

Both articles were suppressed by the Government of
the Electorate of Saxony, under the pretext that they
were tainted with atheism. Simultaneously there was
despatched from Dresden a requisition to the court of
Weimar enjoining upon it the serious punishment of Pro-
fessor Fichte. The court of Weimar did not, it is true,
permit itself to be misled by such a demand; but as
Fichte on this occasion committed the gravest blunders,
amongst others that of writing an " Appeal to the Public "
without the sanction of official authority, the Government
of Weimar, offended at this step and importuned from
other quarters, had no alternative but to administer a
mild reproof to the professor who had imprudently ex-
pressed his views. Fichte, however, considering himself
in the right, was unwilling to submit to such reproof, and
left Jena. To judge from his letters written at this time,
he was especially piqued at the conduct of two persons,
whose official positions lent much weight to their voice in
this affair ; these two persons were His Eeverence the
President of the Consistorial Council, Herr von Herder,
and His Excellence the Privy Councillor, Herr von
Goethe; but both are sufficiently excusable. It is
pathetic to read in the posthumous letters of Herder how
the poor man was embarrassed by the candidates of theo-
logy, who, after studying at Jena, came before him at

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 133

Weimar to undergo examination as Protestant preachers.
About Christ the Son he no longer dared to put a single
question ; he was glad enough to have their mere acknow-
ledgment of the existence of the Father. As for Goethe,
he expresses himself in his Memoirs, regarding this occur-
rence, to the following effect :

" After Reinhold's departure from Jena, an event justly
considered a great loss for the University, the appoint-
ment of successor to him was rashly, even audaciously,
conferred on Fichte, who in his writings had manifested
a certain grandeur, though not perhaps the requisite tact
for dealing with the most important topics of morality
and politics. He was a man of as strong a personality
as had ever been known, and, considered in their higher
aspects, there was nothing censurable in his views ; but
how could he maintain himself on a footing of equality
with a world that he regarded as his own created pos-
session ?

" The hours that he desired to set apart during week-
days for his public lectures being objected to, he under-
took to hold on Sundays the prelections regarding which
objections were raised. The lesser adverse circumstances
and the greater obstacles arising from these had scarcely
been smoothed down and adjusted, when the assertions of
Professor Fichte concerning God and sacred things (about
which he would have done better to have maintained
profound silence) attracted in outside circles troublesome
observation.

" Fichte had ventured in his Philosophical Journal to
express himself about God and sacred things in a manner
that seemed contradictory to the language customarily
employed in dealing with such mysteries. He was called
in question for it ; his defence did not improve matters, for
it was undertaken with passion and without any sus-
picion how well disposed towards him people here were,

134 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

although they knew what interpretation to put on his
ideas and language an interpretation of his opinions
that could not indeed be explained to him in crude
words, just as little as he could be brought to under-
stand how help might be afforded him in the kindliest
spirit. Discussion for and against, doubts and assertions,
confirmations and resolutions, surged about the university
in many-sided uncertain discourse : there was talk of
ministerial remonstrance, of nothing short of a public
reprimand which Fichte might have to expect. There-
upon, throwing aside all moderation, he considered him-
self justified in addressing to the ministry a violent
letter, in which, assuming the certainty of proceedings
being taken against him, he haughtily and vehemently
declared that he would never submit to such treatment ;
that he preferred, without more ado, to quit the university,
in which case he would not do so alone, as several other
influential teachers were in accord with him to leave
the place.

" As a result of this step, all friendly intentions that
had been aroused on his behalf were now restrained, nay,
even paralysed. No expedient, no compromise, was now
possible, and the gentlest measure that could be adopted
was to dismiss him without delay. Then, for the first
time, after the affair was beyond remedy, Fichte per-
ceived the turn his friends had sought to give the affair,
and he was forced to regret his precipitation, whilst we
had reason to compassionate him."

Have we not here his very self, the ministerial Goethe
with his conciliations and prudent reticences ? In reality
he censures Fichte only for having said what he thought,
and for not having said it with the customary disguises
of expression. He does not find fault with the thought,
but with the word. That deism had been annihilated in
the world of German philosophy was, as I have already

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 135

said, a secret known to every one ; a secret, however, that
must not be proclaimed on the housetops. Goethe was
as little a deist as Fichte ; for he was a pantheist But
his very position on the heights of pantheism enabled
Goethe with his sharp eyes to perceive very clearly the
untenableness of the Fichtean philosophy, and his gra-
cious lips could not forbear to smile at what he saw. To
the Jews (and every deist is, after all, a Jew) the doc-
trine of Fichte was an abomination : to the great pagan
it was only a folly. The "great pagan" is, you must
understand, the name bestowed on Goethe in Ger-
many. Yet this name is not quite appropriate. The
paganism of Goethe is wonderfully modernised. His
vigorous heathen nature manifests itself in his clear
penetrating conception of all external facts, of all forms
and colours ; but Christianity has endowed him also with
a profounder intelligence. Christianity, in spite of his
militant antipathy towards it, has initiated him into the
mysteries of the spiritual world; he has drunk of the
blood of Christ, and this has made him comprehend the
most secret voices of nature, like Siegfried, the hero of the
"Nibelungen," who understood the language of the birds the
instant that his lips were moistened by a drop of the slain
dragon's blood. It is a remarkable thing that Goethe's
pagan nature should have been so thoroughly pervaded
by our modern sentimentality, that the antique marble
of his temperament should have pulsated with so much
modern feeling, and that he should have sympathised as
deeply with the sufferings of young Werther as with the
joys of an ancient Greek god. The pantheism of Goethe
differed, therefore, very widely from that of paganism.
To express my ideas briefly : Goethe was the Spinoza of
poetry. The whole of Goethe's poetry is animated by the
same spirit that is wafted towards us from the writings
of Spinoza. That Goethe paid undivided allegiance to

136 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

the doctrine of Spinoza is beyond doubt. At any rate, he
occupied himself with it throughout his life ; in the in-
troductory passages of his Memoirs, as in the concluding
volume recently published, he has frankly acknowledged
this to be the case. I cannot now recollect where I have
read that Herder, losing his temper at finding Goethe
perpetually engaged with Spinoza's works, once exclaimed,
" If Goethe would just for once take up some other Latin
book than one of Spinoza's ! " But this applies not only
to Goethe ; quite a number of his friends, who afterwards
became more or less celebrated as poets, devoted them-
selves at an early period of their lives to pantheism ; and
this doctrine assumed a practical form in German art
before it attained to supremacy amongst us as a philo-
sophic theory. Even in Fichte's time, when idealism
was flourishing most sublimely in the domain of philo-
sophy, in the region of art it was being violently de-
stroyed, and there had already begun in Germany that
celebrated revolt in art a revolt not yet terminated
which traces its origin to the conflict of Romanticism with
the ancient Classical E^gime.

Our first Romanticists were, in fact, moved by a panthe-
istic instinct, which they did not themselves comprehend.
The sentiment, which they mistook for a yearning towards
the Catholic mother Church, was of deeper origin than they
suspected. Their veneration and affection for the tradi-
tions of the Middle Ages, for the popular beliefs, the
diablerie, the sorcery, and the witchcraft of former times,
all this was a suddenly reawakened, though uncompre-
hended, predilection for the pantheism of the old Ger-
mans, and, in its foully stained and spitefully mutilated
form, what they really loved was the pre-christian reli-
gion of their ancestors. I must here recall what was said
in the first part of this book, where I showed how Chris-
tianity absorbed the elements of the old Germanic religion,

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 137

how, after undergoing the most outrageous transforma-
tion, these elements were preserved in the popular beliefs
of the Middle Ages in such a way that the old worship of
nature came to be regarded as mere wicked sorcery, the
old gods as odious demons, and their chaste priestesses as
profligate witches. From this point of view the aberra-
tions of our earliest Komanticists can be more leniently
judged than is usually the case. They wished to restore
the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, for they felt that in
this Catholicism there still survived many sacred recollec-
tions of their first ancestors, many splendid memorials of
their earliest national life. It was these mutilated and
defiled relics that attracted the sympathies of the Koman-
ticists, and they detested a Protestantism and a Liberalism
whose aim was to destroy these relics and to efface the
whole Catholic past.

I shall return, however, to this subject. At present it
is sufficient merely to mention that pantheism began in
Fichte's time to force its way into German art ; that even
Catholic Romanticists unconsciously followed this ten-
dency, and that Goethe was its foremost spokesman.
This is already apparent in his " Werther," wherein he
aspires after a beatific identification with nature. In
" Faust " he seeks to establish relationship with nature
by a method daringly direct and mystical : he conjures
the secret forces of the earth by the magic spell of the
Hollenzwang* But it is in his songs that Goethe's pan-
theism reveals itself with greatest purity and charm.
The doctrine of Spinoza has escaped from its chrysalid
mathematical form, and flutters about us as a lyric of
Goethe. Hence the wrath displayed by our orthodox
believers and pietists against Goethe's song. With their
pious bears' paws they make clumsy efforts to seize this
butterfly that constantly eludes their grasp ; so delicately

* Influence of evil spirits over men. Ta.

138 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

ethereal, so lightly winged is Goethe's song. Frenchmen
can form to themselves no conception of it unless they
possess a knowledge of our language. These songs of
Goethe's have a coquettish charm that is indescribable :
the harmonious verses entwine themselves about the heart
like a tenderly loved one ; the word, embraces whilst the
thought kisses thee.

For our part, we do not see in Goethe's conduct regard-
ing Fichte any of those base motives indicated in even
baser language by his contemporaries. They failed to com-
prehend the different natures of the two men. The most
moderate amongst them misinterpreted Goethe's passive-
ness when, at a later time, Fichte was sorely pressed and
persecuted. They did not correctly appreciate Goethe's
situation. This giant was minister in a liliputian German
state. He could never indulge in natural movements. It
was said of the seated Jupiter of Phidias at Olympia that,
if he were suddenly to stand erect, he would shatter the
dome of the temple. This was precisely Goethe's position
at Weimar : were he suddenly to have risen from his tran-
quil sitting posture, he would have shattered the gable
ridge of the state, or, what is more probable, would have
broken his head against it. And was he, then, to encounter
this risk for a doctrine that was not merely erroneous,
but actually ridiculous ? The German Jupiter remained
calmly seated, and permitted himself to be tranquilly
adored and perfumed with incense.

It would lead me too far from my subject were I to
seek from the standpoint of the artistic interests of this
epoch more completely to justify Goethe's conduct with
regard to the accusation against Fichte. In Fichte's
favour there is the sole circumstance that the accusation
was a mere pretext behind which political motives were
concealed ; for a theologian may with reason be accused
of atheism, since he has accepted the obligation of teaching

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 139

certain doctrines. A philosopher, however, does not and
cannot enter into such an obligation, and his thought re-
mains free as the bird of the air. It is, perhaps, unjust of
me that, partly in order to spare my own, partly in order
to spare the feelings of others, I have not stated here all
the circumstances on which the accusation against Fichte
was founded and justified. I will cite only one of the
dubious passages in the incriminating treatise :

"The living and active moral order is God himself;
we need no other God, nor can we comprehend any other.
There is no ground in human reason for going beyond this
moral order of the universe, and for admitting, as a con-
clusion from effect to cause, some special being as the
source of this effect. The primitive intelligence of man
certainly does riot confirm this conclusion, and is ignorant
of such a being ; only a philosophy capable of self-mis-
apprehension can deduce it."

With characteristic obstinacy, Fichte, in his "Appeal to
the Public " and in his Judicial Vindication," reiterated
his views more strongly and more glaringly, and in lan-
guage, too, that wounds our deepest feelings. We, who
believe in a real God, a God that reveals himself to
our senses in infinite space and to our spirit in infinite
thought ; we, who adore in nature a visible God, and who
recognise in our inmost soul his mysterious voice; we
are repelled by the harsh, even ironical terms in which
Fichte declares our God to be a mere chimera. It is
doubtful, indeed, whether there is irony or mental extra-
vagance in Fichte's endeavour to eliminate from the being
of God all sentient attributes, and thus to deny his very
existence, since existence is a sentient notion, and is only
possible as such ! " The theory of knowledge," he says,
" knows no other mode of existence than a sentient one,
and, as existence is attributable only to the phenomena of

140 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

experience, this predicate cannot apply to God." Fichte's
God, therefore, has no existence ; he is not ; he manifests
himself only as pure action, as a sequence of events, as
ordo ordinans, as the law of the universe.

It is thus that idealism has filtered deity through every
possible abstraction, until at last no residuum is left.
Henceforth, as with you, in place of a king, with us, in
place of a God, law is sovereign.

But which is more absurd, a law of atheism, that is, a
law without God, or a God-law, that is, a God that is only
a law?

The idealism of Fichte ranks as one of the most colossal
errors ever hatched in the human brain. It is more god-
less and more worthy of condemnation than the coarsest
materialism. What is called in France the atheism of
the materialists, is, as I might easily show, an edifying
and devout doctrine when compared with the consequences
of Fichte's transcendental idealism. This I know : both
systems are repugnant to me. Both are also anti-poetic.
The French materialists have written quite as bad verses
as the German transcendental idealists ; but the doctrine
of Fichte was in no respect dangerous to the State, and
still less merited being persecuted as such. In order to
be capable of being led astray by this heresy, one must
have been endowed with speculative acumen in a degree
to be found amongst few men. The great mass, with its
thousands of thick heads, was quite impervious to this
erroneous doctrine. The views of Fichte concerning God
should have been attacked, therefore, by the path of reason,
and not through aid of the police. The accusation of
atheism in philosophy was a thing so strange in Germany,
that Fichte at first really did not understand what it
meant. Quite justly did he remark that the question
whether a system of philosophy is atheistical or not

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 141

sounds to a philosopher as extraordinary as the question
whether a triangle is green or red would sound to a
mathematician.

This accusation had, then, its secret motives, as Fichte
soon perceived. Being of all men the most truthful, we
may implicitly believe what he says in a letter to Eeinhold
with respect to these secret motives. As this letter, dated
the 22d of May 1779, depicts the character of the entire
epoch, and conveys a clear idea of all the affliction of the
man, we shall here quote a portion of it :

"Weariness and disgust determine me to adopt the
resolution, whereof I have already spoken to you, of dis-
appearing completely for a few years. From the view I
took of the state of affairs, I was convinced that duty itself
demanded this resolution ; for in the midst of the present
ferment I shall certainly not obtain a hearing, and I should
only increase the agitation ; but after a few years, when
the first feelings of surprise have calmed down, I shall be
able to speak with all the more emphasis. At the present
moment I think differently. I ought not now to remain
mute, for if I preserve silence now, I shall never again
dare to speak. Since the alliance of Eussia with Austria,
I have long thought probable what is now become a cjer-
tainty for me after recent events, and especially after
the atrocious murder of the French Ambassador, an affair
about which people here are jubilant, and with reference
to which Schiller and Goethe exclaimed, ' Quite right ;
these dogs must be slain! 1 I am convinced that from
this time forward despotism will defend itself with the
energy of despair, that it will become consistent through
Paul * and Pitt, that the basis of its plan is to root out
liberty of opinion, and that the Germans will not impede
the attainment of this object.

" Do not fancy, for example, that the court of Weimar

* The Czar Paul I., 1796-1801. TB.

142 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

feared a diminution in the number of students at the uni-
versity on account of my presence there ; it was too well
assured of the contrary ; it was obliged to remove me in
consequence of a general agreement, strongly supported
by the Electorate of Saxony. Burscher of Leipzig, who
was privy to these secrets, laid a wager of a considerable
sum so long ago as the end of last year, that I would be
exiled before the expiry of the present year. Vogt was
long since won over to my enemies through Burgsdorf.
The department of sciences at Dresden has made it known
that no one who devotes himself to the new philosophy
will receive promotion, or, if already promoted, he shall
be incapable of further advancement. In the Free School
at Leipzig, Rosenmiiller's 10 'Explanatory Criticisms' were
held to be of a suspicious tendency. Luther's Cate-
chism has lately been reintroduced into this school, and
the teachers have been referred back to the symbolical
books. This will not end here, and it will extend. . . .
To sum up : Nothing is more certain than the absolute
certainty that, unless the French gain a tremendous ascen-
dancy, and unless, within a few years, they carry through
important changes in Germany, or at least in a very
considerable portion of it, no man that has been known
during the course of his life to have thought a free thought
will be able to find in Germany a resting-place. . . . There
is for me, however, one thing more certain than certainty
itself, namely this, that though I were presently to find
somewhere a hole wherein to conceal myself, I should, in
two years at furthest, be hunted out of it again, and it is
a dangerous thing to run the risk of being chased from
place to place : of this we have an historical example in
the case of Rousseau.

" Suppose I remain quite silent and write not another
line ; shall I be left in peace on this condition ? I do not
believe it; and admitting that, as regards the courts, 1

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 143

might hope for this, would not the clergy, wherever I
might turn my steps, hound on the populace against me,
suffer me to be stoned by it, and then solicit the govern-
ments to banish me as a person that excited tumults ?
But ought I then to be silent ? No, verily, I ought not ;
for I have reason for believing that, if anything of the
German spirit can be saved, it can be saved through my
speech, whilst by my silence philosophy will be totally and
prematurely ruined. Of those of whom I do not expect
that they will leave me to exist in silence, do I still less
expect that they will permit me freedom of speech.

" But I shall convince them of the harmlessness of my
doctrine. Dear Eeinhold, how canst thou suppose these
men to be well-intentioned towards me ? The fairer my
character is shown to be, the more innocent it appears,
the blacker do these men grow, and the more aggravated
does my real crime appear. I never supposed them to
be persecuting me for so-called atheism : what they per-
secuted in me was the free-thinker, who begins to make
himself intelligible (the obscurity of his style was Kant's
good fortune) ; what they persecuted in me was the decried
democrat ; they were terrified as by a spectre at that in-
dependence which, as they had a dim presentiment, my
philosophy awakens." *

I once more remark that this letter is not of yesterday,
but bears date the 22d of May 1799. The political cir-
cumstances of that time present an even melancholy
resemblance to the most recent condition of Germany;
with this single point of difference, that during the former
period the spirit of liberty flourished among the learned,
among poets and men of letters generally, whereas nowa-
days this spirit finds a far more ready utterance among the

* The whole of the long paragraph that follows was struck out by the
censor in the first German editions. It ID restored in the later editions.
TB

144 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

active masses, among artisans and tradespeople. During
the epoch of the first revolution, whilst a leaden, altogether
Teutonic somnolence weighed down the people, whilst all
Germany seemed overcome by a species of brutal repose,
our literary life revealed the wildest commotion and fer-
ment. The most solitary author, living in the remotest
nook of Germany, took part in this movement ; possessed
of no accurate knowledge of political occurrences, by a
kind of secret affinity he felt their social importance and he
expressed it in his writings. This phenomenon reminds
me of those large sea-shells sometimes placed as ornaments
on the mantel-shelf, which, however distant they may be
from the sea, at once begin to murmur when the hour of
flood-tide arrives and when the waves are dashing against
the shore. When the revolutionary tide began to flow in
Paris, that great human ocean, when its waves surged and
roared amongst you here, German hearts across the Ehine
were resounding and murmuring in response. . . . But
they were so isolated, surrounded as they were by mere
unfeeling pieces of porcelain, tea-cups and coffee-pots and
Chinese pagods, that nodded their heads mechanically as
though they understood what the talk was about ! Alas !
our poor German predecessors had to atone most bitterly
for their revolutionary sympathy. Petty nobles and cant-
ing priests played on them the coarsest and basest of their
spiteful tricks. Some of them fled to Paris, and have
disappeared or died here in poverty and misery. I lately
saw an old blind compatriot who has remained in Paris
since that time. I saw him at the Palais-Royal, whither
he had come to warm himself a little in the sun. It was
pitiful to behold how pale and thin he was, and how he
groped his way along the sides of the houses. They told
me he was the old Danish poet Heiberg. 11 I also saw not
long since the garret in which citizen George Forster 12
died. But it would have fared even worse with the

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 145

friends of liberty who remained in Germany had not
Napoleon and the French made haste to conquer us.
Napoleon certainly never fancied that he had himself
been the saviour of ideology. Without his aid our philo-
sophers, and with them their ideas, would have been
exterminated by the gibbet and the wheel But the
German friends of liberty, too republican in their senti-
ments to do homage to Napoleon, and too magnanimous
to ally themselves with a foreign domination, wrapped
their thoughts in profound silence. They went about
sorrowfully with broken hearts and sealed lips. When
Napoleon fell they were seen to smile, though it was a
mournful smile, and they still remained silent. They
took scarcely the slightest interest in the patriotic enthu-
siasm which, with the sanction of the supreme powers,
then broke forth jubilantly throughout Germany. They
knew what they knew, and were silent. As these Ee-
publicans lead a very chaste and simple life, they usually
attain a great age, and when the Revolution of July took
place, many of them were still alive. We were not a
little astonished then at beholding the old fellows, whom
we had always been accustomed to see going about bowed
down and in almost imbecile silence, suddenly raise their
heads and smile amicably at us youngsters, and seize each
other's hands, and begin to tell merry tales. I even heard
one of them singing; for he sang to us in a caf6 the
Marseillaise Hymn, and we learnt the melody and the
beautiful words, and it was not long till we sang it better
than the old man himself ; for in the middle of the best
stanzas he would often laugh like a fool or weep like a
child. It is always a fortunate thing when such old
people remain alive to teach young ones songs. We
young ones shall not forget these songs, and some of us
will one day teach them by heart to grandchildren yet
unborn; but many of us will have rotted by that time,

146 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

some in the prisons of home, some in the garrets of
exile.

Let us speak of philosophy again ! I have shown how
the philosophy of Fichte, though constructed of the most
attenuated abstractions, presented a rigid inflexibility in
its consequences, which were pursued to the most auda-
cious extremes. But one fine morning we perceived a
great change in this philosophy ; it began to blossom
with innocent flowers and to weep childishly ; it became
tender and modest. The Titan of idealism, who had
climbed up to heaven by the ladder of thought, and had
groped about with daring hand in its empty chambers,
now becomes a creature bowed down with Christian
humility, who sighs much about love. This is Fichte's
second period, and concerns us little here. His entire
system of philosophy undergoes the strangest modifica-
tions. About this time he wrote a book, lately translated
into French, " The Destiny of Man." A book of a similar
character, " Instruction towards Attaining the Celestial
Life," also belongs to this period.

Fichte, the opinkmative man, would, of course, never
admit this great transformation. He maintained that his
philosophy was always the same, that it was merely its
mode of expression that had undergone change and im-
provement ; people had never understood him. He con-
tended, too, that the Philosophy of Nature, which had
sprung up in Germany and which was supplanting idealism,
was in principle precisely the same as his own system, and
that his pupil, Herr Joseph Schelling, in detaching himself
from his master and in introducing this new philosophy,
had merely remodelled the nomenclature of the old philo-
sophy, and had merely amplified his old doctrine by the
addition of barren accessories.

This brings us to a new phase of German thought.
We have just mentioned the names Joseph Schelling arid

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 147

Philosophy of Nature ; but as the former is almost quite
unknown in France, and as the expression Philosophy of
Nature is not very generally understood, I must explain
the significance of both names. It will certainly not
be possible to do so exhaustively in this sketch ; at pre-
sent we shall only utter a warning against certain insi-
dious errors, and merely draw attention to the social
importance of this philosophy.

At the outset it may be said that Fichte was not very far
wrong in contending that Herr Joseph Schelling's doctrine
was in reality his own merely amplified and formulated in
different terms. Precisely like Herr Joseph Schelling does
Fichte teach : there exists but one being, the Ego, the
absolute ; he also teaches the identity of the ideal and the
real. In the " Theory of Philosophy/' as already shown,
Fichte sought by means of an intellectual act to construct
the real out of the ideal. Joseph Schelling, however, has
reversed the process ; he endeavours to explain the ideal
by the real. To express my meaning more clearly : Start-
ing from the axiom that thought and nature are one,
Fichte, by an operation of the intellect, arrives at the
external world; by thought he creates nature, by the
ideal the real. For Schelling, on the contrary, though he
starts from the same axiom, the external world resolves
itself into pure ideas; nature for him becomes thought,
the real becomes ideal. Each of these tendencies, that of
Fichte and that of Schelling, is to a certain extent the
complement of the other. For, accepting as ultimate the
axiom just referred to, philosophy naturally falls into two
parts, in one of which it would be shown how from the
idea nature rises to phenomenal reality ; in the other,
how nature resolves itself into pure ideas. Philosophy
may therefore be divided into Transcendental Idealism
and into Philosophy of Nature. Now both of these sides
were really acknowledged by Schelling: the latter he

U 8 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

followed out in his "Ideas towards a Philosophy of
Nature," the former in his " System of Transcendental

Idealism."

I refer to these works (of which one appeared in 1797,
the other in 1800) merely because those two jeciprocally
complementary sides are expressed in their very titles,
and not because they contain a complete system. No;
such a system is to be found in none of Schelling's works.
He, unlike Kant and Fichte, has no chief work that may
be regarded as the central ,point of his philosophy. It
would be an injustice to judge Schelling by the contents
of a book, and by a rigorous interpretation of the letter.
One should rather read his works in chronological order,
follow up the gradual development of his thought, and
then take firm grasp of his fundamental idea. Indeed, it
seems to me often necessary, in reading his works, to dis-
tinguish where thought ceases and where poetry begins ;
for Schelling is one of those beings endowed by nature
with more poetic temperament than poetic power one
who, incapable of satisfying the daughters of Parnassus,
has fled to the woodlands of philosophy, where he has con-
tracted with abstract hamadryads a barren union. The
sentiment of such natures is poetic, but the instrument,
the word, is feeble ; they strive in vain after an artistic
form wherein to communicate their thoughts and their
knowledge. Poetry is at once Schelling's strength and his
weakness. It is here that he is distinguished from Fichte
as much to his advantage as to his disadvantage. Fichte
is merely a philosopher; his power consists in his dialectic,
aud his strength in ability to demonstrate. This, how-
ever, is Schelling's weak side; he lives in a world of
intuition ; he does not feel at home on the cold heights of
logic ; he stretches forth eager hands towards the flowery
valleys of symbolism, and his philosophical strength lies
in the art of construction. But this is an intellectual

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 149

aptitude found as frequently amongst mediocre poets as
amongst the best philosophers.

From this last indication it becomes clear that Schelling,
in so much of his philosophy as is pure transcendental
idealism, remained, and could not but remain, a mere
echoer of Fichte; whilst in the philosophy of nature,
where he has to deal with flowers and stars, he cannot
help blossoming and shining radiantly. Not only he him-
self, but also like-minded friends attached themselves by
preference to this side of his philosophy, and the com-
motion thereby aroused was only a kind of reaction of
poetasters against the former abstract philosophy of the
intellect. Like school- children freed from their tasks after
sighing all day in close rooms under the burden of syntax
and arithmetic, the scholars of Schelling rushed out of
doors to nature, to the fragrant sunny world of the real,
and huzzaed and turned summersaults and made a great
disturbance.

The expression " scholars of Schelling " must certainly
not be taken in its customary sense. Schelling himself
tells us it was only a school such as existed among
the ancient poets that he desired to found, a school of
poetry in which no one was bound to accept a particular
doctrine or to submit to a special discipline, but one in
which each was to obey the idea, and to manifest it in
his own manner. He might also have said that he wished
to found a school of prophets, where the inspired should
begin to prophesy as fancy moved them, and in whatever
dialect they pleased. This, indeed, was done by those
disciples whom the master's spirit had deeply moved ; the
most shallow-brained began to prophesy each in a different
tongue, and philosophy had its great day of Pentecost.

Things gravest and most sublime may be turned into
masquerade and buffoonery ; a rabble of cowardly knaves
and melancholy clowns is capable of compromising a great

150 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

idea : this we see in the case of the philosophy of nature.
But the ridicule brought upon this philosophy by Schel-
ling's school of the prophets or school of the poets ought
not really to be imputed to it, for the idea on which the
philosophy of nature rests is indeed nothing else than the
idea of Spinoza, than pantheism.

The doctrine of Spinoza and the philosophy of nature,
as explained by Schelling during his best period, are
essentially one and the same thing. The Germans having
reached the stage of despising the materialism of Locke,
and having pursued to its last consequences the idealism
of Leibnitz and found it equally unfruitful, arrived finally
at the third son of Descartes at Spinoza. Philosophy
had once more described a great circle, the same, it may
be said, that it had already traversed two thousand years
before in Greece. But a closer comparison of these two
circuits of human thought reveals an essential difference.
Amongst the Greeks there were as daring sceptics as
amongst ourselves ; the Eleatics were as decided in their
denial of the reality of the external world as our modern
transcendental idealists. Plato rediscovered the world
of thought in the phenomenal world as plainly as did
Schelling. But we had this advantage over the Greeks
QS well as over the Cartesian school : we commenced our
philosophic circuit by an investigation of the sources of
human knowledge, by the " Critique of Pure Reason " of
our Immanuel Kant.

The mention of Kant affords me an opportunity of
adding to the foregoing observations, that one species of
evidence in favour of the existence of God, the so-called
moral evidence, with which Kant did not interfere, was
overthrown with great 6dat by Schelling. I have already
remarked, however, that this evidence was not very con-
clusive, and that Kant perhaps allowed it to subsist from
promptings of good-nature. The God of Schelling is the

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 151

God-universe of Spinoza at least he was so in the year
1 80 1, in the second volume of the Journal of Specula-
tive Physics. Here God is the absolute identity of nature
and thought, of matter and inind ; and absolute identity
is not the cause of the universe, but is the universe itself,
consequently the God-universe. In it there exist neither
opposites nor divisions. Absolute identity is also absolute
totality. A year later Schelling still further developed
his God in a work entitled, " Bruno ; or, Concerning the
Divine and Natural Principles of Things." This title
recalls the most noble martyr of our doctrine, Giordano
Bruno of Nola, of glorious memory. The Italians asserted
that Schelling borrowed all his best ideas from old Bruno,
and they accused him of plagiarism. They \vere wrong,
for there is no such thing as plagiarism in philosophy.
In the year 1804 ^ e Grod of Schelling appeared at last in
His complete form in a work entitled " Philosophy and
Keligion." It is here that we have in its completed form
the theory of the absolute expressed in three formulas.
The first of these is the categorical: The absolute is
neither the ideal nor the real (neither mind nor matter),
but is the identity of both. The second formula is the
hypothetical : When subject and object are present, the
absolute is the essential equality of both. The third
formula is the disjunctive : There is only one being, but
this unity of being may be regarded at one and the same
time, or by turns, as wholly ideal or as wholly real. The
first formula is strictly negative ; the second supposes a
condition more difficult to comprehend than the hypo-
thesis itself; and the third formula is exactly that of
Spinoza: absolute substance is cognisable either as
thought or as extension. Along the path of philosophy,
then, Schelling could proceed no further than Spinoza,
since the absolute can be comprehended only under the
form of these two attributes, thought and extension. But

152 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

at this point Sclielling leaves the philosophical route, and
seeks by a kind of mystical intuition to arrive at the con-
templation of the absolute itself ; he seeks to contemplate
it in its central point, in its essence, where it is neither
ideal nor real, neither thought nor extension, neither sub-
ject nor object, neither mind nor matter, but ... I know
not what !

Here philosophy ceases with Schelling, and poetry I
may say folly commences. But it is here that he meets
with the greatest sympathy from a number of silly admirers
whom it suits admirably to abandon calm reflection, and
who, as if in imitation of the dancing dervishes described
by our friend Jules David, continue spinning round in a
circle until objective and subjective worlds become lost to
them, until both worlds melt into a colourless nothing-
ness, that is neither real nor ideal, until they see things
invisible, hear what is inaudible, until they hear colours
and see tones, until the absolute reveals itself to them.

I am of opinion that with this attempt intellectually to
conceive the absolute Schelling's philosophic career comes
to a close. A greater thinker now steps on the scene, one
who rounds into a completed system the philosophy of
nature, explains from this synthesis the whole world of
phenomena, supplements the great ideas of his predeces-
sors by yet greater ideas, subjects their philosophy to every
form of discipline, and thus establishes it on a scientific
basis. He is the scholar of Schelling, a scholar, however,
who, making himself by degrees possessor of all his mas-
ter's might in the realm of philosophy, outgrows his mas-
ter, and finally thrusts him into obscurity. This is the
great Hegel, greatest of philosophers begotten by Ger-
many since Leibnitz. There can be no doubt that he far
overtops Kant and Fichte. To the penetration of the for-
mer and to the vigour of the latter he adds the tranquil-
lity of a mind that works by constitutional methods, a

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 153

harmony of thought not to be found in either Kant or
Fichte, in both of whom the revolutionary spirit is pre-
dominant. No comparison is possible, between this man
and Joseph Schelling ; for Hegel was a man of character.
And though, like Schelling, he may have given support
by certain suspicious vindications to the existing order of
affairs in church and state, he did so in favour of a state
that, in theory at least, rendered homage to the principle
of progress, and in favour of a church that regarded the
principle of unrestrained inquiry as its vital element ; and
he made no secret of this ; he avowed all his intentions.
Schelling, on the contrary, goes cringing about in the
ante- chambers of practical and theoretical absolutism, in
the dens of Jesuitism he lends a hand in forging intellec-
tual manacles, and all the while he tries to make believe
he is still the same unperverted child of light that he
once was ; he apostatises his apostasy, and to the shame
of deserting his cause he adds the cowardice of lying !

We may not disguise it, either from motives of piety or
of prudence ; we will make no secret of it ; the man who
was once the boldest exponent in Germany of the religion
of pantheism, he who proclaimed most loudly the sane-
tification of nature and the redintegration of man in his
divine rights, has become apostate to his own doctrine ;
he has forsaken the altar consecrated by his own hands ;
he has slunk back to the religious kennels of the past ; he
is now a good Catholic, and preaches an extra-mundane
personal God, " who has committed the folly of creating
the world." The followers of the old orthodoxy may, if
they choose, ring their church-bells and sing " Kyrie
Eleison " over such a conversion ; it proves nothing, how-
ever, in favour of their doctrine ; it merely proves that man
turns to religion for support when he grows old and weary,
when his physical and intellectual powers fail him, when
he can no longer either enjoy or reason. So many free-

154 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

thinkers, you say, have been converted on their deathbed !
But, at any rate, do not boast of this ! Such stories be-
long at best to pathology, and are very bad evidence for
your case. After all, they only prove that it was impos-
sible for you to convert these free-thinkers so long as
they went about under God's free sky in the enjoyment
of their healthy senses and in full possession of their rea-
soning faculty.

It is Ballanche, I think, who says, that it is a law of
nature that initiators die as soon as they have completed
the work of initiation. Alas ! worthy Ballanche, that is
only part of the truth, and I might with more reason
assert that, when the work of initiation is complete, the
initiator dies or becomes apostate. And so we may,
perhaps, mitigate to a certain extent the severe judgment
pronounced by intelligent Germany on Herr Schelling ;
we may, perhaps, commute the heavy sentence of con-
tempt under which he lies into silent commiseration ; and
his desertion of his own doctrine we may explain as a
consequence of the natural law in accordance with which,
whenever any one has devoted all his energies to the ex-
pression or to the carrying out of an idea and has accom-
plished his task, that person falls exhausted, either into
the arms of death, or into the embrace of his former
opponents.

Such an explanation as the foregoing may enable us to
understand certain other more terrible phenomena of our
day which deeply afflict us. It may enable us to com-
prehend why men who have sacrificed everything for their
opinion, who have fought and suffered for that opinion,
should, after the victory is gained, abandon it and pass
over into the enemy's camp ! I may be permitted also,
after such an explanation, to draw attention to the fact
that not Joseph Schelling only, but, in some sort, both
Kant and Fichte, may likewise be accused of defection.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 155

Fichte died opportunely enough before his desertion of
his own philosophy had time to become very notorious ;
but Kant is unfaithful to the " Critique of Pure Beason,"
even whilst writing the " Critique of Practical Eeason."
The initiator dies or becomes apostate !

I know not how it comes that this last sentence affects
my soul with such a melancholy influence that I do not
feel sufficient strength here to record the other bitter
truths regarding the present Herr Schelling. Let us
rather say something in praise of that dear former Schel-
ling, whose memory blossoms perennially in the annals of
German thought ; for the former Schelling, like Kant and
Fichte, represents one of the great phases of our philoso-
phical revolution, compared by me in these pages to the
political revolution in Trance. In truth, while in Kant
we see the terrorist Convention, and in Fichte the Napo-
leonic Empire, in Schelling we behold the reaction of the
Restoration which followed the Empire. But it was at
first a restoration in a better sense. Schelling re-estab-
lished nature in its legitimate rights ; he aimed at a recon-
ciliation between mind and nature; he sought to reunite
them in the eternal soul of the world. He restored that
great philosophy of nature which we find in the old Greek
philosophers, which Socrates first drew into closer relation
with the human spirit, and which thereafter flowed forth
again as the ideal. He restored that great philosophy of
nature which, after unobtrusively budding out of the old
pantheistic religion of the Germans, displayed during the
age of Paracelsus its fairest flowers, but was stifled by
the introduction of Cartesianism. Alas! he ended by
restoring things whereby he may in the worst sense be
compared with the French Restoration. But public reason
did not long endure such things ; he was ignominiously
driven from the throne of thought. Hegel, his major-
domo, carried off his crown and shaved his head, and since

156 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

then the deposed Schelling has lived as a poor shaveling
in Munich, a city that preserves in its very name its
monkish character, and in Latin is called Monacho mona-
chorum. There I saw him, with his large pale eyes and
depressed, stupefied countenance, moving about irreso-
lutely like a spectre, a miserable picture of fallen royalty.
Hegel, however, had himself crowned at Berlin, unfor-
tunately with some slight ceremony of anointing, and he
has ever since held sway over German philosophy.

Our philosophical revolution is concluded; Hegel has
closed its great circle. Henceforth we see only the
developing and perfecting of the philosophy of nature.
This philosophy has, as I have already said, forced its
way into all sciences, and has produced the most extra-
ordinary and the most grandiose results. Much that is
distressing, as I have also indicated, has of necessity come
to light. These phenomena are so numerous that the
mere record of them would fill an entire book. This is
the really interesting and richly coloured part of our
philosophical history. I am convinced, however, that it
will be more profitable for Frenchmen to know nothing
about it, for knowledge of this sort could only tend to pro-
duce greater confusion in French intellects ; many of the
propositions of the philosophy of nature, if detached from
their connection, might cause much mischief amongst you.
Of this at least I am certain, had you been acquainted in
the year 1830 with the German philosophy of nature, you
could not have produced the Eevolution of July. There
was necessary for the accomplishment of this act a con-
centration of ideas and of forces, a generous partiality, a
certain virtue, a self-sufficing absence of reflection such as
only your old school of philosophy rendered possible.
Perverse philosophical ideas, which might in case of need
have served to justify legitimacy and the doctrine of the
incarnation, would have damped your enthusiasm, would

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 157

have paralysed your courage. I regard it therefore as an
important fact in the history of the world that your great
eclectic * who at that epoch was desirous of giving you
instruction in German philosophy, had not the slightest
comprehension of the subject. His providential ignorance
was salutary for France and for the whole of humanity.

Alas ! the philosophy of nature, which in many regions
of knowledge, especially in the natural sciences strictly so
called, produced the most splendid fruits, would elsewhere
have brought forth the most obnoxious weeds. Whilst
Oken, one of the most highly gifted thinkers, and one of
the greatest citizens of Germany, was discovering his new
worlds of ideas, and was inspiring the youth of Germany
with enthusiasm for the imprescriptible rights of humanity,
for freedom and equality, alas ! at that very time Adam
Miiller was lecturing on the stall-feeding of nations ac-
cording to the principles of natural philosophy; at that
very time Herr Gorres was preaching the obscurantism of
the Middle Ages from the physical science point of view,and
was declaring the state to be only a tree which ought also
to have in its organic distribution a stem, branches, and
leaves, all as may be beautifully seen in the hierarchic
corporations of the Middle Ages ; at that very time Herr
Steffens was proclaiming the law of philosophy in virtue
of which the peasantry is distinguished from the nobility,
the peasant being by nature destined to labour without
enjoying, whereas the noble is entitled to enjoy without
labouring ; yea, only a few months since, as I am told, a
dolt of a country squire in Westphalia, an arrant block-
head, bearing, I believe, the cognomen Haxthausen, pub-
lished a pamphlet wherein he solicited the Government of
the King of Prussia to have regard to the consistent parallel
demonstrated by philosophy as existing in the organisation
of the world, and to mark more strictly political distinc-

* Victor Cousin. [TB]

158 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

tions ; for as in nature there are four elements, fire, air,
earth, and water, so in society there are four analogous
elements, the nobility, the clergy, the burgesses, and the
peasants.

When such melancholy follies were seen to spring from
the tree of philosophy and to expand into poisonous
flowers, when in particular it was observed that young
Germany, absorbed in metaphysical abstractions, was ob-
livious to the most urgent questions of the time and had
become unfit for practical life, well might patriots andfriends
of liberty feel a righteous indignation against philosophy,
whilst some of them went the length of utterly condemn-
ing it as a vain and profitless pursuit of shadows. 13

We shall not commit the folly of seriously confuting
these malcontents. German philosophy is an important
fact ; it concerns the whole human race, and only our
latest descendants will be in a position to decide whether
we are to be praised or blamed for having first worked
out our philosophy and afterwards our revolution. It
seems to me that a methodical people, such as we are,
must begin with the reformation, must then occupy itself
with systems of philosophy, and that only after their com-
pletion could it pass to the political revolution. I find this
sequence quite rational. The heads that have first served
for the speculations of philosophy can afterwards be
struck off by the revolution for whatever object it pleases ;
but philosophy would not have been able to utilise the
heads struck off by a revolution that preceded it. Give
yourselves no anxiety however, ye German Republicans ;
the German revolution will not prove any milder or
gentler because it was preceded by the "Critique" of
Kant, by the " Transcendental Idealism " of Fichte, or even
by the Philosophy of Nature. These doctrines served
to develop revolutionary forces that only await their
time to break forth and to fill the world with terror

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 159

and with admiration. Then will appear Kantians as little
tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world of
ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe
the soil of our European life in order to extirpate the
last remnants of the past. There will come upon the
scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be
restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest; for they
live in the spirit ; they defy matter like those early Chris-
tians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments
nor by bodily delights. Yea, in a time of social revolu-
tion these transcendental idealists will prove even more
pertinacious than the early Christians; for the latter
endured earthly martyrdom in the hope of attaining
celestial blessedness, whilst the transcendental idealist
looks on martyrdom itself as a vain show, and is invul-
nerable within the intrencliment of his own thought.
But most of all to be feared would be the philosophers
of nature were they actively to mingle in a German
revolution, and to identify themselves with the work of
destruction. For if the hand of the Kantian strikes with
strong unerring blow, his heart being stirred by no feeling
of traditional awe; if the Fichtean courageously defies
every danger, since for him danger has in reality no
existence ; the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible in
this, that he has allied himself with the primitive powers
of nature, that he can conjure up the demoniac forces of
old German pantheism; and having done so, there is
aroused in him that ancient German eagerness for battle
which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even
for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the
combat itself. Christianity and this is its fairest merit
subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardour of
the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and
when the cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces,

160 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

then will break forth again the ferocity of the old com-
batants, the frantic Berserker rage whereof Northern poets
have said and sung so much. The talisman has become
rotten, and the day will come when it will pitifully
crumble to dust. The old stone gods will then arise from
the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of
centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will arise
again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals. . . .
When ye hear the trampling of feet and the clashing of
arms, ye neighbours' children, ye French, be on your
guard, and see that ye mingle not in the fray going on
amongst us at home in Germany. It might fare ill with
you. See that ye take no hand in kindling the fire ; see
that ye attempt not to extinguish it. You might easily
burn your fingers in the flame. Smile not at my counsel,
at the counsel of a dreamer, who warns you against
Kantians, Fichteaus, Philosophers of Nature. Smile not
at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality
the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the
region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed as the
lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true Ger-
man character : it is not very nimble, but rumbles along
somewhat slowly. But come it will, and when ye hear a
crashing such as never before has been heard in the
world's history, then know that at last the German thun-
derbolt has fallen. At this commotion the eagles will
drop dead from the skies and the lions in the farthest
wastes of Africa will bite their tails and creep into their
royal lairs. There will be played in Germany a drama
compared to which the French Eevolution will seem but
an innocent idyl. At present, it is true, everything is
tolerably quiet; and though here and there some few
men create a little stir, do not imagine these are to be the
real actors in the piece. They are only little curs chasing

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 161

one another round the empty arena, barking and snapping
at one another, till the appointed hour when the troop of
gladiators appear to fight for life and death.

And the hour will come. As on the steps of an amphi-
theatre, the nations will group themselves around Germany
to witness the terrible combat. I counsel you, ye French,
keep ver y quiet, and, above all, see that ye do not applaud.
We might readily misunderstand such applause, and, in
our rude fashion, somewhat roughly put you to silence.
For, if formerly in our servile, listless mood we could
oftentimes overpower you, much easier were it for us to
do so in the arrogance of our new-born enthusiasm for
liberty. Ye yourselves know what, in such a case, men
can do ; and ye are no longer in such a case. Take heed,
then ! I mean it well with you ; therefore it is I tell you
the bitter truth. Ye have more to fear from a free Ger-
many than from the entire Holy Alliance with all its
Croats and Cossacks. For, in the first place, they do not
love you in Germany, which is almost incomprehensible,
since ye are so amiable, and during your stay amongst us
took such pains to please at least the better and fairer
half of the German people. But even though this half
still loved you, it is precisely the half that does not bear
arms, and whose friendship, therefore, would be of little
help to you. What you are really accused of I could never
understand. Once in a beer-cellar at Gottingen I heard
a young Old-German assert that it was necessary to be
revenged on France for Conradin of Hohenstaufen, whom
you beheaded at Naples. Doubtless ye have long since
forgotten that : we, however, forget nothing. Ye see, then,
that whenever we have a mind to quarrel with you there
will be no lack of valid grounds. In any case, I advise
you to be on your guard. Happen what may in Germany,
though the Crown Prince of Prussia or Dr. Wirth should
attain supremacy, be ye ever armed ; remain quietly at

162 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

your post, your weapons in your hands. I mean it well
with you, and I was seized with dismay when I heard it
said lately that your Ministry proposed to disarm France.

As ye are, despite your present romantic tendency, a
born classical people, ye know Olympus. Amongst the
joyous gods and goddesses quaffing and feasting of nectar
and ambrosia, ye may behold one goddess, who, amidst
such gaiety and pastime, wears ever a coat of mail, the
helm on her head and the spear in her hand.

She is the goddess of Wisdom.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX.

1 Page 20.

IN translating these introductory paragraphs, the latest
edition of the French version has been followed. In the
Bevite des Deux Mondes a single short paragraph stood
in place of the amplified and more explicit statement in
the later editions. In the German version, again, the
corresponding paragraphs vary from the text of the
French version. The book is introduced to German
readers in the following manner :

" Frenchmen have lately been in the habit of supposing
that an acquaintance with the productions of our polite
literature is sufficient to enable them to comprehend
Germany. Such an acquaintance, however, has only
served to raise them from a condition of total ignorance
to a condition of superficial knowledge ; for the produc-
tions of our literature remain for them mere dead flowers,
and the whole circle of German thought presents but a
dreary enigma to them so long as they do no not
understand the significance of Eeligion and Philosophy
in Germany.

" In endeavouring to elucidate to a certain extent these
two subjects, I believe that I am undertaking a useful
work. For me it is no light task. It is of primary im-
portance to avoid the technicalities of a scholastic lan-
guage with which Frenchmen are totally unacquainted.

166 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

Besides, I have not studied deeply enough the subtilties
either of theology or of metaphysics to be in a position
to formulate them in a manner sufficiently simple and
brief to meet the requirements of the French public. I
shall therefore deal only with the great questions that are
discussed in German divinity and philosophy ; I shall
attempt to illustrate merely their social importance, and
throughout this book I shall keep clearly in view the
limited nature of my own resources as an expositor, and
the capacity of French readers for comprehending the
subject.

" Great German philosophers who may happen to glance
at these pages will haughtily shrug their shoulders at the
inadequate treatment of whatever is here presented. May
I beg them, however, kindly to bear in mind that the
little I have to say will be quite clearly and intelligibly
expressed ; whereas their works, though doubtless very
erudite, vastly erudite, very profound, stupidly profound,
are likewise as incomprehensible as they are profound.
What do locked granaries profit the people so long as it
has no key wherewith to open them ? The people hungers
for bread, and is ready to thank me for the morsel of
intellectual food which I honestly share with them.

" I do not believe that it is want of talent that restrains
most of our German men of learniDg from giving popular
expression to their views on religion and philosophy. I
believe that it is dread of the consequences of their own
intellectual research that prevents them communicating
its results to the people. I, however, do not possess this
dread, for I am no man of learning ; I am myself of the
people. I am no learned man, I am not among the num-
ber of the seven hundred wise men of Germany. I am
one of the great crowd standing before the gates of their
wisdom, and should any truth chance to slip through and
find its way to me, then it has come far enough : I write

APPENDIX. 167

it down on paper in fair characters, and give it to the
compositor ; he sets it tip in leaden type and passes it to
the printer, who prints it, and then it belongs to the
whole world.

" The religion in which we in Germany rejoice is Chris-
tianity. It will be my duty then to explain what
Christianity is, how it became Eoman Catholicism, how
from this it became Protestantism, and how German
philosophy is the offspring of Protestantism.

"In beginning with the discussion of religion I pre-
monish all pious souls not on any account to entertain
the slightest anxiety.

" Fear not, pious souls ! " &c.

2 Page 2$.

A short paragraph is here omitted in the latest French
edition. Its omission is no doubt due to the fact that
Heine's views about democracy underwent considerable
change between the date when he wrote and the date
when he last revised his book.

" It is, perhaps, because the great ones of this earth are
certain of their supremacy, and because they are at heart
resolved to go on for ever abusing this supremacy by
turning it to our misfortune, that they are convinced of
the necessity of Christianity for their peoples ; and it is
in reality a tender impulse of benevolence that prompts
them to take so much trouble in upholding this religion ! "

The succeeding paragraph begins with the words "The
ultimate fate of Christianity depends, then, on whether
we still have need of it," altered in the latest French
edition to : " The duration of religions," &c., as at page 25.

168 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

8 Page 41.

This paragraph reads as follows in the German ver-
sion :

"I have already frequently made use of the words
spiritualism and sensualism. These words, however, have
here no reference, such as they have when employed by
French philosophers, to the two different sources of our
knowledge : I employ them, as may be gathered from
the general drift of the foregoing remarks, to designate
those two different modes of thought, of which one mode
desires, by the destruction of matter, to glorify the spirit,
whilst the other mode seeks to vindicate the natural rights
of matter against the usurpations of the spirit."

4 Page 41.

Instead of these opening sentences this paragraph in
the latest German edition begins thus :

" To the above-mentioned beginnings of the Lutheran
^Reformation beginnings which already revealed the
whole spirit of that event I must draw special attention,
since there are still current here in France regarding the
Eeformation the old misconceptions which were spread
abroad by Bossuet through his * Histoire des Variations/
and which are even repeated by modern writers."

6 Page 58.

Luther's Hymn has found several English translators,
Thomas Carlyle being the earliest of them. Catherine
Winkworth's translation probably the one best known
is to be found in her " Christian Singers of Germany," and
in various collections of hymns. The present rendering is

APPENDIX. 169

a very halting attempt to preserve the form as well as
the spirit of the original Readers of German will at
once perceive how greatly superior would be a translation
that accurately reproduced the rugged metre without
sacrificing the fervour and vigour of the " mail-clad
words " to a merely rhythmical version, however skilfully
achieved. But the former task would be far more diffi-
cult of accomplishment than the latter.

6 Page 58.

At this point the first part of the French version closes,
but in the German version Heine goes on to draw a
comparison between modern and early German literature.
This comparison is made to turn chiefly on the distinc-
tion between the " Classical " and the " Romantic " treat-
ment of the subject-matter in literature. A more general
and more inclusive definition of these much-abused terms
is given by Heine in his "Romantic School." For the
sake of completeness, however, a translation of what
follows in the German version is here given.

["In order to show that modern German literature
begins with Luther and not with Hans Sachs], it is suffi-
cient to indicate clearly the contrast between our new
and our older literatures.

"In surveying German literature as it flourished before
Luther's time, we arrive at the following conclusions :

" i. Its material, its subject-matter, like the life itself
of the Middle Ages, consists of a mingling of two hetero-
geneous elements, which during a long period struggled
with each other in such close contact that at last they
became blended together: these two elements were
Germanic nationality and Indo-Gnostic, so-called Catholic
Christianity.

170 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

" 2. The treatment of the subject-matter, or rather the
spirit in which it was treated, in this older literature, was
Eomantic. The term 'Romantic* is erroneously applied
also to the material of that literature, as it is to all
manifestations of the Middle Ages that spring from the
blending of the two elements referred to Germanic
nationality and Catholic Christianity. For as certain
poets of the Middle Ages treated Greek history and
mythology in a spirit truly Romantic, so Mediaeval
customs and legends may be represented in a classical
form. The terms ' Clascic ' and ' Romantic ' refer, there-
fore, merely to the spirit of the treatment. The treat-
ment is Classic when the form of the representation is
identical with the idea to be represented, as is the case
in Greek works of art in which the closest harmony
exists between form and idea. The treatment is Romantic
when the form does not reveal the idea through identity
Avith it, but leaves the idea to be conjectured paraboli-
cally. I here use the word ' parabolically ' in preference
to the word 'symbolically.' Greek mythology possessed
an array of deities, each of whom, besides identity of form
and idea, might acquire a symbolic signification. But in
this Greek religion it was only the outward fashion of
the divinities that presented anything definite, all else,
their life and conduct, was left to the voluntary caprice
of the poet. In the Christian religion, on the other hand,
there are no such definite personalities, there are only
definite facts, definite sacred events and actions into
which the creative faculty of man might import a para-
bolic significance. It has been said that Homer invented
the Greek gods; this is not true: they already existed
in definite outlines; what Homer did was to invent
their history. Artists of the Middle Ages, on the other
hand, never dared to invent the slightest detail in the
historical part of their religion: the fall of man, the

APPENDIX. 171

incarnation, the baptism, the crucifixion, and so forth,
were indisputable facts which could not be moulded anew,
but to which the creative genius of man might impart a
parabolic signification. In this parabolic spirit all the
arts of the Middle Ages worked, and their treatment is
Romantic. Hence the mystical universalism of the poetry
of the Middle Ages; the figures are shadowy, all their
actions are indefinite, everything about them has a twi-
light aspect as if illuminated by uncertain moonlight;
the idea is signified in the form only as an enigma, and
we see merely vague forms such as were appropriate to a
spiritualistic literature. There is not, as with the Greeks,
a sunbright harmony between form and idea; but often-
times the idea towers above the given form to which the
latter strives despairingly to attain, and thus we have a
fantastic and strange sublimity; oftentimes the form
quite overtops the idea when some foolish paltry thought
drags itself along encumbered by a colossal form, and
then we have a grotesque farce; almost always do we
find deformity.

" 3. It was a universal characteristic of the older litera-
ture of which we speak that in all its productions it
manifested the firm and settled faith that dominated all
things temporal as well as spiritual during its epoch. Every
opinion of the time was based on authorities ; the poet
trod with the surefootedness of a mule paths that lay
among the precipices of doubt, and his works are per-
vaded by a daring calm, by a holy confidence that became
impossible in a later age when the highest authority
the authority of the pope was overthrown, and when
all other authorities toppled down after it. All the
poetry of the Middle Ages possesses the same character ;
it seems as though it had not been composed by individual
men, but by the whole people ; it is objective, epic, naif.

" But in the literature that burst into blossom under the

172 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

influence of Luther we find quite the opposite of all
this.

" i. Its material, the subject-matter with which it has
to deal, is the conflict between the interests and opinions
of the Reformation and the old order of things. To the
new spirit of the age the mongrel creed springing from
the two elements referred to German nationality and
Indo-Gnostic Christianity is utterly repugnant. The
latter element it regards as heathen idolatry, which
must give place to the true religion of the Judaic-Deistic
gospel. A new order of things takes shape, the spirit
makes discoveries that promote the well-being of matter ;
by the development of industrial pursuits and by philo-
sophy spiritualism becomes discredited in public opinion ;
the third estate emerges ; the roar of the revolution begins
to echo in human hearts and heads ; and what the age
feels and thinks, what it needs and will have, it gives
expression to, and this is the material of modern literature.

" 2. The spirit of treatment is no longer Romantic, but
Classic. Through the revival of ancient literature a joy-
ous enthusiasm for Greek and Latin authors diffused
itself over all Europe, and men of learning, the only men
who in those days wrote, strove to possess themselves of
the spirit of classical antiquity, or at any rate sought in
their writings to imitate classical forms of art. If, unlike
the Greeks, they failed to attain harmony of form and
idea, all the more strictly did they hold to the externals
of Greek treatment: they distinguished, according to
Greek precept, the species of form ; they refrained from
all Romantic extravagance; and in this respect we call
them classical.

" 3. The universal characteristic of modern literature is
the predominance in it of individuality and of scepticism.
The authorities are dethroned; reason is now the only
lamp to illumine the steps of man ; conscience his only

APPENDIX. 173

guiding-staff in the dark labyrinth of this life. Man
now stands face to face alone with his creator and sings
to him his lay. Thus our modern literature begins with
spiritual songs. Later on, however, as literature becomes
secular, the intensest self-consciousness, the feeling of
personality, predominates. Poetry is no longer objective,
epic, and naif ; it is subjective, lyrical, and reflective."

7 Page 8 1.

John Tauler was born at Strasburg in 1290. In 1308
he entered the Dominican order, and for some time studied
theology at Paris. On his return to his native city he
came under the influence of Master Eckhart, called " the
Father of German Speculation," and the most celebrated
of the so-called mystics of the Middle Ages. Whilst,
however, the mysticism of Eckhart led to quietism, Tauler's
whole life was spent in practical religious activity. He
was the greatest preacher of his time, and is even held by
some writers to have been the greatest preacher of Medi-
aeval times. When about fifty years of age, Tauler was
brought under an influence more powerful than that of
Eckhart, namely, that of Nicolas of Basle, who was styled
"the Friend of God." At the instigation of Nicolas,
Tauler passed two years in religious seclusion and in
the practice of the severest ascetic discipline. He then
resumed his preaching, braved the interdict laid by Pope
John XXII. on Strasburg, and the horrors of the " black
death" that devastated the city in 1348. Obliged for a
time to betake himself to Cologne, he afterwards returned
to Strasburg, and died there in 1361. Besides the three
volumes of sermons published at Frankfort in 1826, many
of Taulex's homilies still remain unprinted. The authen-
ticity of the sacred songs attributed to him is doubtful.

174 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

8 Page 83.

William Law, author of the " Serious Call to a Devout
and Holy Life," was the English translator and expositor
of Jacob Bobone's works. Jane Lead, one of the most
celebrated of English mystics, possessed an intimate
acquaintance with Bohme's writings, an acquaintance
obtained probably through Dr. John Pordage, who presided
over an English society of " Illuminati." In 1697 Jane
Lead founded the sect of the " Philadelphians," of which
Francis Lee, the poet of mysticism, was a member. Such
was the influence of Bohme's works and system of theosophy
in this country. But far more remarkable is the influence
they exercised on German philosophy. Schelling, though
reluctant to admit the fact, owed much to the writings of
the shoemaker of Gorlitz. Hegel not only acknowledged
that the title " Philosophicus Teutonicus" had been justly
bestowed on Bohine, from whom he dates the beginning
of modern philosophy, but he also declares his substantial
agreement with Bohme's first principles. Louis Claude de
Saint Martin (1743-1803), called "Le Philosophe Incon-
nue," translated into French Bohme's first work " Aurora."
Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) was the most
recent German expositor of Bohme, though his own specu-
lations were of far too original a nature to permit of his
being styled a disciple of Bohme.

9 Page 124.

Mr. Adamson's rendering of the term Wissenscfiaftslehre
is here gratefully adopted, though, as he justly says, we have
no English equivalent for the German. In the French
version of " Religion and Philosophy in Germany," Wissen-
schaft&lchre is very inadequately translated Doctrine de la

APPENDIX. 175

Science. In his excellent short biography of Fichte (Black-
wood's Philosophical Classics), Mr. Adamson does not fail
to do justice to what Heine calls the social significance
of Fichte. In his introductory chapter he says : " There
exists not now, there never did exist to any extent, a
school of followers of Fichte ; it may well be doubted if
there are at present half-a-dozen students of his works.
As a patriot, as a representative of what seems noblest
and loftiest in the German character, he lives, and will
doubtless continue to live, in the grateful remembrance
of his countrymen ; as a metaphysician, he lives not at all
beyond the pages of the historians of philosophy."

10 Page 142.

J. H. Kosenmiiller (1736-1815), a celebrated German
preacher. In 1785 he was appointed pastor of the
Thomaskirche, and a professor of theology at the Univer-
sity of Leipzig. His most important service to his age
and country consisted in the improvements he was the
means of bringing about in the methods of teaching in
the schools at Leipzig. His voluminous writings are
partly of a devotional and partly of a critical character.
Heine was here probably referring either to the " Scholia
in Novum Testamentum " or to the " Historia interpreta-
tionis Librorum Sacrorum in Ecclesia Christiana."

11 Page 144.

Peter Andreas Heiberg, dramatist and political writer,
was born at Bordinborg, in Denmark, in 1758. Banished
from his native country on account of his political opinions,
he betook himself to Paris, where a great part of his life
was spent. During the First Empire he held an appoint-

176 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.

ment in the French Foreign Office, and at the Bestoration
he was awarded a pension. He died at Paris in 1841.
Heiberg's fame rests chiefly on his comedies, of which
' Heckingborn ' is the hest known. He also wrote
< Political Aphorisms/ and a 'Precis Historique et
Critique de la Constitution de la Monarchic Danoise'
(Paris, 1820). In imitation of the Letters of Junius, he
wrote ' Lettres d'un Norv^gien de la Vielle Roche'
(Paris, 1822).

12 Page 144.

John George Forster was born near Danzig in 1754.
At an early age he accompanied his father, John Eeinhold
Forster, the traveller and naturalist, to Russia. Father and
son afterwards came to England, where the former settled
for a time as a teacher of languages at Warrington. In 1 77 2
John Eeinhold Forster was appointed naturalist to Captain
Cook's second expedition, and was again accompanied by
his son, who in 1777 published au account of the expedi-
tion ("A Voyage Hound the World in His Britannic
Majesty's Sloop Resolution"). After holding during
several years a professorship of natural history, first at
Cassel and afterwards at Wilna in Germany, John
George Forster was called to Mainz, as librarian to the
Elector, in 1788. On the taking of Mainz by the French
in 1792, Forster, who had become deeply imbued with
the principles of the Revolution, was sent to Paris as the
deputy of his like-minded fellow- townsmen to sue for the
union of their city with the French Republic. He died at
Paris in 1794. Forster's political career is treated as
material by H. Hoenig in his novel "Die Clubisten in
Mainz."

APPENDIX. 177

18 Page 158.

At this point the first German edition comes to a close.
What follows was struck out by the censor. It is restored
in the later editions. A portion of Heine's remarkable pro-
phecy has already been fulfilled in the events of 1870-
1871. The fantastic and reactionary policy of Prince
Bismarck seems not unlikely to aid in bringing about
that catastrophe in Germany "compared to which the
French revolution will seem but an innocent idyl." It is
to this singular prophecy, in part already fulfilled and in
part perhaps about to be fulfilled, that Heine refers in
the " Preface to the Second German Edition." (See page
10 of the present volume.)

OTHER BEACON PAPERBACKS IN THIS FIELD

BP3

Aron

BP5

Orwell

BP6

Wolfe

BP7

Cassirer

BP9

Buber

BP 12

Hook

BP15

Huizinga

BP17

Halevy

BP22

Bainton

BP28

Kierkegaard

BP32

Toynbee

BP45

Polanyi

BP47

Seidenberg

BP48

Harnack

BP52

Bentley

BP61

Troeltsch

BP64

Buber

BP67

Gierke

BP71

Sohm

BP76

Gooch

BP 77 De Ruggiero
BP80 Silver

BP 85 Coulton

Century of Total War $1.65

Homage to Catalonia 1.25

Three Who Made a Revolution 2.45

Philosophy of the Enlightenment 1.45

Between Man and Man 1.25

Hero in History 1.25

Homo Ludens 1.25

Growth of Philosophical Radicalism 1.95
Reformation of the Sixteenth

Century 1.60

The Attack on "Christendom" 1.60

The Industrial Revolution 1.25

The Great Transformation 1.45

Post-Historic Man 1.45

Outlines of the History of Dogma 1.95

A Century of Hero Worship 1.60

Protestantism and Progress 1.45

Paths in Utopia 1.50

Political Theories of the Middle Age 1.95

Outlines of Church History 1.95
History and Historians in the 19th

Century 2.75

The History of European Liberalism 2.45
A History of Messianic Speculation

in Israel 1.75

Inquisition and Liberty 1.95

124337

5i